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iHIRCAHTHLEUSRAI^ 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH 

AND HIS TIME, 



WITH OTHER PAPERS. 



By CHARLES KINGSLEY. 

AUTHOR OF "HYPATIA," " TWO YEARS AGO," ETC. 



BOSTON: 
TICKNOR AND FIELDS, 

M DOCC LIX. 



^ 



author's edition. 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 
PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



i 







CONTENTS. 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME 1 

PLAYS AND PURITANS 74 

BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL 119 

HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS . . . . . . .155 

TENNYSON 177 

THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART . . . 196 

NORTH DEVON 221 

PHAETHON 276 

ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS 317 

MY WINTER-GARDEN 398 

ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH . . . . . 426 



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KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 

[North British Review. ,] 

" Truth is stranger than fiction." A trite remark. We all 
say it. again and again: but how few of us believe it! How 
few of us, when we read the history of heroical times and heroical 
men, take the story simply as it stands. On the contrary, we try 
to explain it away ; to prove it all not to have been so very won- 
derful ; to impute accident, circumstance, mean and commonplace 
motives ; to lower every story down to the level of our own lit- 
tleness, or what we (unjustly to ourselves, and to the God who 
is near us all) choose to consider our level ; to rationalize away 
all the wonders, till we make them at last impossible, and give 
up caring to believe them ; and prove to our own melancholy sat- 
isfaction that Alexander conquered the world with a pin, in his 
sleep, by accident. 

And yet in this mood, as in most, there is a sort of left-handed 
truth involved. These heroes are not so far removed from us, 
after all. They were men of like passions with ourselves, with 
the same flesh about them, the same spirit within them, the same 
world outside, the same devil beneath, the same God above. 
They and their deeds were not so very wonderful. Every child 
who is born into the world is just as w r onderful ; and, for aught 
we know, might, mutatis mutandis, do just as wonderful deeds. 
If accident and circumstance helped them, the same may help 

1. Life of Sir Walter Raleigh. By Patrick Fraser Tytler, Esq. F.R.S., 
F.S.A. 2. Raleigh's Discovery^ of "Guiana. Edited by Sir Robert Schom- 
burgk. 3. Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh. By Macvey Napier, Esq. 
4. Raleigh's Works, with Lives by Oldys and Birch. 5. Bishop Goodman's His- 
tory of his own Times. 

1 



2 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

us : have helped us, if we will look back down our years, far 
more than we have made use of. 

They were men, certainly, very much of our own level : but 
may we not put that level somewhat too low ? They were cer- 
tainly not what we are ; for if they had been, they would have 
done no more than we : but is not a man's real level not what 
he is, but what he can be, and therefore ought to be ? No doubt 
they were compact of good and evil, just as we : but so was 
David, no man more ; though a more heroical personage (save 
One) appears not in all human records ; but may not the secret 
of their success have been, that, on the whole, (though they found 
it a sore battle,) they refused the evil and chose the good ? It 
is true, again, that their great deeds may be more or less ex- 
plained, attributed to laws, rationalized : but is explaining always 
explaining away ? Is it to degrade a thing to attribute it to a 
law ? And do you do anything more by " rationalizing " men's 
deeds than prove that they were rational men ; men who saw 
certain fixed laws, and obeyed them, and succeeded thereby, ac- 
cording to the Baconian apophthegm, that nature is conquered 
by obeying her ? 

But what laws ? 

To that question, perhaps, the eleventh chapter of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews will give the best answer, where it says, that by 
faith were done all the truly great deeds, and by faith lived all 
the truly great men, who have ever appeared on earth. 

There are, of course, higher and lower degrees of this faith ; 
its object is one more or less worthy : but it is in all cases the 
belief in certain unseen eternal facts, by keeping true to which 
a man must in the long run succeed. Must ; because he is more 
or less in harmony with heaven, and earth, and the Maker 
thereof, and has therefore fighting on his side a great portion of 
the universe ; perhaps the whole ; for as he who breaks one 
commandment of the law is guilty of the whole, because he 
denies the fount of all law, so he who with his whole soul keeps 
one commandment of it is likely to be in harmony with the 
whole, because he testifies of the fount of all law. 

We will devote a few pages to the story of an old hero, of a 
man of like passions with ourselves ; of one who had the most 
intense and awful sense of the unseen laws, and succeeded 
mightily thereby ; of one who had hard struggles with a flesh 
and blood which made him at times forget those laws, and failed 
mightily thereby : of one whom God so loved that He caused 
each slightest sin, as with David, to bring its own punishment 
with it, that while the flesh was delivered over to Satan, the 
man himself might be saved in the Day of the Lord ; of one, 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 3 

finally, of whom nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a 
thousand may say. " I have done worse deeds than he : but I 
have never done as good ones." 

In a poor farm-house among the pleasant valleys of South 
Devon, among the white apple-orchards and the rich water- 
meadows, and the red fallows and red kine. in the year of grace 
1552. a boy was born, as beautiful as day. and christened TTalter 
Raleigh. His father was a gentleman of ancient blood : none 
older in the land : but. impoverished, he had settled down upon 
the wreck of his estate, in that poor farm-house. Xo record of 
him now remains ; but he must have been a man worth knowing 
and worth loving, or he would not have won the wife he did. 
She was a Champernoun. proudest of Xorman squires, and could 
probably boast of having in her veins the blood of Courtneys, 
Emperors of Byzant. She had been the wife of the famous 
knight Sir Otho Gilbert, and lady of Compton Castle, and had 
borne him three brave sons. John. Humphrey, and Adrian ; all 
three destined to win knighthood also in due time, and the two 
latter already giving promises, which they well fulfilled, of be- 
coming most remarkable men of their time. And yet the fair 
Champernoun. at her husband's death, had chosen to wed Mr. 
Raleigh, and share life with him in the little farm-house at Hayes. 
She must have been a grand woman, if the law holds true that 
great men always have great mothers ; an especially grand 
woman, indeed : for few can boast of having borne to two differ- 
ent husbands such sons as she bore. Xo record, as far as we 
know, remains of her ; nor of her boy's early years. One can 
imagine them, nevertheless. 

Just as he awakes to consciousness, the Srnitkfield fires are 
extinguished. He can recollect, perhaps, hearing of the burn- 
ing of the Exeter martyrs ; and he does not forget it : no one 
forgot or dared forget it in those days. He is brought up in 
the simple and manly, yet high-bred ways of English gentlemen 
in the times of u an old courtier of the Queen's." His two 
elder half-brothers also, living some thirty miles away, in the 
quaint and gloomy towers of Compton Castle, amid the apple- 
orchards of Torbay. are men as noble as ever formed a young 
lad's taste. Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert, who afterwards, 
both of them, rise to knighthood, are — what are they not ? 
soldiers, scholars. Christians, discoverers, and " planters" of for- 
eign lands, geographers, alchemists, miners, Platonical philoso- 
phers ; many-sided, high-minded men, not without fantastic 
enthusiasm : living heroic lives, and destined, one of them, to 
die a heroic death. From them Raleigh's fancy has been fired, 
and his appetite for learning quickened, while he is yet a daring 



4 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

boy, fishing in the gray trout-brooks, or going up with his father 
to the Dartmoor hills, to hunt the deer with hound and horn, 
amid the wooded gorges of Holne, or over the dreary downs of 
Hartland Warren, and the cloud-capt thickets of Cator's Beam, 
and looking down from thence upon the far blue southern sea, 
wondering when he shall sail thereon, to fight the Spaniard, and 
discover, like Columbus, some fairy-land of gold and gems. 

For before this boy's mind, as before all intense English minds 
of that day, rise, from the first, three fixed ideas, which yet are 
but one — the Pope, the Spaniard, and America. 

The first two are the sworn and internecine enemies (whether 
they pretend a formal peace or not) of Law and Freedom, Bible 
and Queen, and all that makes an Englishman's life dear to him. 
Are they not the incarnations of Antichrist ? Their Moloch 
sacrifices flame through all lands. The earth groans because of 
them, and refuses to cover the blood of her slain. And America 
is the new world of boundless wonder and beauty, wealth and 
fertility, to which these two evil powers arrogate an exclusive 
and divine right ; and God has delivered it into their hands ; and 
they have done evil therein with all their might, till the story of 
their greed and cruelty rings through all earth and heaven. Is 
this the will of God ? Will he not avenge for these things, as 

O O 7 

surely as he is the Lord who executeth justice and judgment in 
the earth? 

These are the young boy's thoughts. These were his thoughts 
for sixty-six eventful years. In whatsoever else he wavered, he 
never wavered in that creed. He learnt it in his boyhood, 
while he read Fox's Martyrs beside his mother's knee. He 
learnt it as a lad, when he saw Hawkins and Drake changed 
by Spanish tyranny and treachery from peaceful merchantmen 
into fierce scourges of God. He learnt it scholastically, from 
fathers and divines, as an Oxford scholar, in days when Oxford 
was a Protestant indeed, in whom there was no guile. He 
learnt it when he went over, at seventeen years old, with his gal- 
lant kinsman Henry Champernoun, and his band of one hun- 
dred gentlemen volunteers, to flesh his maiden sword in behalf of 
the persecuted French Protestants. He learnt it as he listened 
to the shrieks of the San Bartholomew ; he learnt it as he 
watched the dragonnades, the tortures, the massacres of the 
Netherlands, and fought manfully under Norris in behalf of 
those victims of " the Pope and Spain." He preached it in far 
stronger and wiser words than we can express it for him, in that 
noble tract of 1591, on Sir Richard Grenville's death at the 
Azores — a Tyrtaean trumpet-blast such as has seldom rung in 
human ears ; he discussed it like a cool statesman in his pam- 









SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 



phlet of 1596, on A War with Spain. He sacrificed for it 
the last hopes of his old age, the wreck of his fortunes, his just 
recovered liberty ; and he died with the old God's battle-cry 
upon his lips, when it awoke no response from the hearts of a 
coward, profligate, and unbelieving generation. This is the back- 
ground, the key-note of the man's whole life, of which, if we lose 
the recollection, and content ourselves by slurring it over in the 
last pages of his biography with some half-sneer about his put- 
ting, like the rest of Elizabeth's old admirals, " the Spaniard, the 
Pope, and the Devil " in the same category, we shall understand 
very little about Ealeigh ; though, of course, we shall save our- 
selves the trouble of pronouncing as to whether the Spaniard 
and the Pope were really in the same category as the devil ; or, 
indeed, which might be equally puzzling to a good many histo- 
rians of the last century and a half, whether there be any devil 
at all. 

The books which we have chosen to head this review, are all 
of them more or less good, with one exception, and that is Bishop 
Goodman's Memoirs, on which much stress has been lately laid, 
as throwing light on various passages of Raleigh, E^sex, Cecil, 
and James's lives. Having read it carefully, we must say plainly, 
that we think the book an altogether foolish, pedantic, and un- 
trustworthy book, without any power of insight or gleam of rea- 
son, without even the care to be self-consistent ; having but one 
object, the whitewashing James, and every noble lord whom the 
bishop has ever known ; but in whitewashing each, the poor old 
flunkey so bespatters all the rest of his pets, that when the work 
is done, the whole party look, if possible, rather dirtier than before. 
And so we leave Bishop Goodman. 

Mr. Fraser Tytler's book is well known ; and it is on the 
whole a good one ; because he really loves and admires the man 
of whom he writes : but he is wonderfully careless as to author- 
ities, and too often makes the wish father to the thought — indeed 
to the fact. Moreover, he has all the usual sentimental cant 
about Mary Queen of Scots, and all the usual petty and prurient 
scandal about Elizabeth, which is to us anathema, which prevents 
his really seeing the time in which Raleigh lived, and the ele- 
ment in which he moved. This sort of talk is happily dying 
out just now ; but no one can approach the history of the Eliza- 
bethan age (perhaps of any age) without finding that truth is all 
but buried under mountains of dirt and chaff — an Augaean stable 
which, perhaps, will never be swept clean. Yet we have seen, 
with great delight, several attempts toward removal of the said 
superstratum of dirt and chaff from the Elizabethan histories, in 
several articles, all evidently from the same pen, (and that one, 



6 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

more perfectly master of English prose to our mind than any 
man living,) in the Westminster Review and Fraser's Maga- 
zine* 

Sir Robert Schomburgk's edition of the Guiana Yoyage con- 
tains an excellent Life of Raleigh, perhaps the best yet written ; 
of which we only complain, when it gives in to the stock-charges 
against Raleigh, as it were at second hand, and just because they 
are stock-charges, and because, too, the illustrious editor (unable 
to conceal his admiration of a discoverer in many points so like 
himself) takes all through "an apologetic tone of " Please don't 
laugh at me. I daresay it is very foolish ; but I can't help lov- 
ing the man." 

Mr. Napier's little book is a reprint of two Edinburgh Review 
articles on Bacon and Raleigh. The first, a learned statement 
of facts in answer to some unwisdom of a Quarterly reviewer, 
(as we suspect an Oxford Aristotelian ; for " we think we do 
know that sweet Roman hand.") It is clear, accurate, convinc- 
ing, complete. There is no more to be said about the matter, 
save that facts are stubborn things, and 

■" " Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Suello! " 

The article on Raleigh is very valuable ; first, because Mr. 
Napier has had access to many documents unknown to former 
biographers ; and next, because he clears Raleigh completely 
from the old imputation of deceit about the Guiana mine, as well 
as of other minor charges. With his general opinion of Raleigh's 
last and fatal Guiana voyage, we have the misfortune to differ 
from him toto coelo, on the strength of the very documents which 
he quotes. But Mr. Napier is always careful, always temperate, 
and always just, except where he, as we think, does not enter 
into the feelings of the man whom he is analyzing. ' Let readers 
buy the book (it will tell them a hundred things they do not 
know) and be judge between Mr. Napier and us. 

In the meanwhile, one cannot help watching with a smile how 
good old Time's scrubbing brush, which clears away paint and 
whitewash from church pillars, does the same by such characters 
as Raleigh's. After each fresh examination, some fresh count 
in the hundred-headed indictment breaks down. The truth is, 
that as people begin to believe more in nobleness, and to gird up 
their loins to the doing of noble deeds, they discover more noble- 
ness in others. Raleigh's character was in its lowest Nadir in 

* We especially entreat readers' attention to two articles in vindication of 
the morals of Queen Elizabeth, in Fraser's Magazine of 1854; to one in the 
Westminster' of 1854, on Mary Stuart; and one in the same of 1852, on England's 
Forgotten Worthies. 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 7 

the days of Voltaire and Hume. What shame to him ? For 
so were more sacred characters than his. Shall the disciple be 
above his master ? Especially when that disciple was but too 
inconsistent, and gave occasion to the uncircumcised to blas- 
pheme ? But Cayley, after a few years, refutes triumphantly 
Hume's silly slanders. He is a stupid writer : but he has sense 
enough, being patient, honest, and loving, to do that. 

Mr. Fraser Tytler shovels away a little more of the dirt-heap ; 
Mr. Napier clears him, (for which we owe him many thanks,) 
by simple statement of facts, from the charge of having deserted 
and neglected his Virginia colonists ; Humboldt and Schomburgk 
from the charge of having lied about Guiana ; and so on ; each 
successive writer giving in generally on merest hearsay to the 
general complaint against him, either from fear of running coun- 
ter to big names, or from mere laziness, and yet absolving him 
from that particular charge of which their own knowledge ena- 
bles them to judge. In the trust that we may be able to clear 
him from a few more charges, we write these pages, premising 
that we do not profess to have access to any new and recondite 
documents. We merely take the broad facts of the story from 
documents open to all, and comment on them as we should wish 
our own life to be commented on. 

But we do so on a method which we cannot give up ; and 
that is the Bible method. We say boldly, that historians have 
hitherto failed in understanding not only Raleigh, Elizabeth, but 
nine tenths of the persons and facts in his clay, because they will 
not judge them by the canons which the Bible lays down — (by 
which we mean not only the New Testament, but the Old, which, 
as English Churchmen say, and Scotch Presbyterians have ere 
now testified with sacred blood, is " not contrary to the New.") 

Mr. Napier has a passage about Raleigh for which we are 
sorry, coming as it does from a countryman of John Knox. 
" Society, it would seem, was yet in a state in which such a man 
could seriously plead, that the madness he feigned was justified " 
(his last word is unfair, for Raleigh only hopes that it is no sin) 
" by the example of David, King of Israel ! " What a shocking 
state of society when men actually believed their Bibles, not too 
little, but too much ! For our parts, we think that if poor dear 
Raleigh had considered the example of David a little more closely, 
he need never have feigned madness at all ; and that his error 
lay quite in an opposite direction from looking on the Bible 
heroes, David especially, as too sure models. At all events, we 
are willing to try Raleigh by the very scriptural standard which 
he himself lays down, not merely in this case unwisely, but 
in his History of the World more wisely than any historian 



8 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

whom we have ever read ; and to say, " Judged as the Bible 
taught our Puritan forefathers to judge every man, "the character 
is intelligible enough ; tragic, but noble and triumphant : judged 
as men have been judged in history for the last hundred years, 
by hardly any canon save those of the private judgment, which 
philosophic cant, maudlin sentimentality, or fear of public opin- 
ion, may happen to have begotten, the man is a phenomenon, 
only less confused, abnormal, suspicious than his biographers' 
notions about him." Again we say, we have not solved the 
problem ; but it will be enough if we make some think it both 
soluble, and worth solving. 

Let us look round, then, and see into what sort of a country, 
into what sort of a world, the young adventurer is going forth, 
at seventeen years of age, to seek his fortune. 

Born in 1552, his young life has sprung up and grown with 
the young life of England. The earliest fact, perhaps, which he 
can recollect, is the flash of joy on every face which proclaims 
that Mary Tudor is dead, and Elizabeth reigns at last. As he 
grows, the young man sees all the hope and adoration of the 
English people centre in that wondrous maid, and his own centre 
in her likewise. He had been base had he been otherwise. She 
comes to the throne with such a prestige as never sovereign 
came, since the days when Isaiah sang his paean over young 
Hezekiah's accession. Young, learned, witty, beautiful, (as with 
such a father and mother she could not help being,) with an ex- 
pression of countenance remarkable (we speak of those early 
days) rather for its tenderness and intellectual depth than its 
strength, she comes forward as the Champion of the Reformed 
Faith, the interpretess of the will and conscience of the people 
of England — herself persecuted all but to the death, and purified 
by affliction, like gold tried in the fire. She gathers round her, 
one by one, young men of promise, and trains them herself to 
their work. And they fulfil it, and serve her, and grow gray- 
headed in her service, working as faithfully, as righteously, as 
patriotically, as men ever worked on earth. They are her u fa- 
vourites ; " because they are men who deserve favour ; men who 
count not their own lives dear to themselves for the sake of the 
queen and of that commonweal which their hearts and reasons 
tell them is one with her. They are still men, though ; and 
some of them have their grudgings and envyings against each 
other : she keeps the balance even between them as skilfully, 
gently, justly, as woman ever did, or mortal man either. Some 
have their conceited hopes of marrying her, becoming her mas- 
ters. She rebukes and pardons. " Out of the dust I took you, 
sir ! go and do your duty, humbly and rationally, henceforth, or 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 9 

into the dust I trample you again ! " And they reconsider them- 
selves, and obey. But many, or most of them, are new men, 
country gentlemen, and younger sons. She will follow her 
father's plan, of keeping down the overgrown feudal princes, who, 
though brought low by the wars of the Roses, are still strong 
enough to throw every thing into confusion by resisting at once 
Crown and Commons. Proud nobles reply by rebellion, come 
down southwards with ignorant Popish henchmen at their backs ; 
will restore Popery, marry the Queen of Scots, make the middle 
class and the majority submit to the feudal lords and the minor- 
ity. The Alruna-maiden, with her u aristocracy of genius/' is 
too strong for them ; the people's heart is with her, and not with 
dukes. Each mine only blows up its diggers, and there are 
many dry eyes at their ruin. Her people ask her to marry. 
She answers gently, proudly, eloquently : " She is married — the 
people of England is her husband. She has vowed it." And 
well she keeps her vow. And yet there is a tone of sadness in 
that great speech. Her woman's heart yearns after love, after 
children ; after a strong bosom on which to repose that weary 
head. But she knows that it must not be. She has her reward. 
" Whosoever gives up husband or child for my sake and the gos- 
pel's, shall receive them back a hundredfold in this present life," 
as Elizabeth does. Her reward is an adoration from high and 
low, which is to us now inexplicable, impossible, overstrained, 
which was not so then. For the whole nation is in a mood of 
exaltation ; England is fairyland ; the times are the last days — 
strange, terrible, and glorious. 

At home are Jesuits plotting ; dark, crooked-pathed, going up 
and down in all manner of disguises, doing the devil's work if 
men ever did it ; trying to sow discord between man and man, 
class and class ; putting out books full of filthy calumnies, de- 
claring the queen illegitimate, excommunicate, a usurper. Eng- 
lish law null, and all state appointments void, by virtue of a 
certain "bull," and calling on the subjects to rebellion and 
assassination, even on the bed-chamber women to do to her " as 
Judith did to Holofernes." She answers by calm contempt. 
Now and then Burleigh and Walsingham catch some of the 
rogues, and they meet their deserts ; but she for the most part 
lets them have their way. God is on her side, and she will not 
fear what man can do to her. 

Abroad, the sky is dark and wild, and yet full of fantastic 
splendour. Spain stands strong and awful, a rising world — 
tyranny, with its dark-souled Cortezes and Pizarros, Alvas, Don 
Johns, and Parmas, men whose path is like the lava stream, 
who go forth slaying and to slay, in the name of their gods, like 

1* 



10 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

those old Assyrian conquerors on the walls of Nineveh, with 
tutelary genii flying above their heads, mingled with the eagles 
who trail the entrails of the slain. By conquest, intermarriage, 
or intrigue, she has made all the southern nations her vassals or 
her tools ; close to our own shores, the Netherlands are struggling 
vainly for their liberties ; abroad, the Western Islands, and the 
whole trade of Africa and India, will in a few years be hers. 
And already the Pope, whose " most Catholic " and faithful ser- 
vant she is, has repaid her services in the cause of darkness by 
the gift of the whole new world — a gift which she has claimed 
by cruelties and massacres unexampled since the days of Timour 
and Zinghis Khan. There she spreads and spreads, as Drake 
found her picture in the Government House at St. Domingo, 
the horse leaping through the globe, and underneath, " Non 
sufficit orbis." Who shall Avithstand her, armed as she is with 
the three-edged sword of Antichrist — superstition, strength, and 
gold ? 

English merchantmen, longing for some share in the riches of 
the New World, go out to trade in Guinea, in the Azores, in New 
Spain ; and are answered by shot and steel. " Both policy and 
religion," as Fray Simon says, fifty years afterwards, " forbid 
Christians to trade with heretics ! " " Lutheran devils, and ene- 
mies of God," are the answer they get in words ; in deeds, when- 
ever they have a superior force they may be allowed to land, 
and to water their ships, even to trade, under exorbitant restric- 
tions ; but generally this is merely a trap for them. Forces are 
hurried up ; and the English are attacked treacherously, in spite 
of solemn compacts ; for " No faith need be kept w r ith heretics." 
And wo to them if any be taken prisoners, even wrecked. The 
galleys, and the rack, and the stake, are their certain doom ; for 
the Inquisition claims the bodies and souls of heretics all over 
the world, and thinks it sin to lose its own. A few years of such 
wrong raise questions in the sturdy English heart. What right 
have these Spaniards to the New World ? The Pope's gift ? 
Why, he gave it by the same authority by which he claims the 
wdiole world. The formula used when an Indian village is 
sacked is, that God gave the whole world to St. Peter, and that 
he has given it to his successors, and they the Indies to the King 
of Spain. To acknowledge that lie would be to acknowledge 
the very power by which the Pope claims a right to depose 
Queen Elizabeth, and give her dominions to whomsoever he will. 
A fico for Bulls ! 

By possession, then ? That may hold for Mexico, Peru, New 
Grenada, Paraguay, which have been colonized ; though they 
were gained by means which make every one concerned in con- 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. H 

quering them worthy of the gallows ; and the right is only that 
of the thief to the purse whose owner he has murdered. But as 
for the rest — Why the Spaniard has not colonized, even explored, 
one twentieth of the New World, not even one fourth of the 
coast. Is the existence of a few petty factories, often hundreds 
of miles apart, at a few river mouths, to give them a claim to 
the whole intermediate coast, much less to the vast unknown 
tracts inside ? We will try that. If they appeal to the sword, 
so be it. The men are treacherous robbers ; we will indemnify 
ourselves for our losses, and God defend the right. 

So argued the English ; and so sprung up that strange war of 
reprisals, in which, for eighteen years, it was held that there was 
no peace between England and Spain beyond the line, i. e. be- 
yond the parallel of longitude where the Pope's gift of the wes- 
tern world was said to begin ; and, as the quarrel thickened and 
neared, extended to the Azores, Canaries, and coasts of Africa, 
where English and Spaniards flew at each other as soon as seen, 
mutually and by common consent, as natural enemies, each in- 
voking God in the battle with Antichrist. 

Into such a world as this goes forth young Raleigh, his heart 
full of chivalrous worship for England's tutelary genius, his 
brain aflame with the true miracles of the new-found Hesperides, 
full of vague hopes, vast imaginations, and consciousness of enor- 
mous power. And yet he is no wayward dreamer, unfit for this 
workday world. With a vein of song " most lofty, insolent, and 
passionate," indeed unable to see aught without a poetic glow 
over the whole, he is eminently practical, contented to begin at 
the beginning, that he may end at the end ; one who could work 
terribly, " who always laboured at the matter in hand as if he 
were born only for that." Accordingly, he sets to work faith- 
fully and stoutly, to learn his trade of soldiering ; and learns it 
in silence and obscurity. He shares (it seems) in the retreat at 
Moncontour, and is by nt the death of Conde, and toils on for 
five years, marching and skirmishing, smoking the enemy out of 
mountain-caves in Languedoc, and all the Avild work of war. 
During the San Bartholomew massacre we hear nothing of him ; 
perhaps he took refuge with Sidney and others in Walsirigham's 
house. No records of these years remain, save a few scattered 
reminiscences in his works, which mark the shrewd, observant 
eye of the future statesman. 

When he returned we know not. We trace him, in 1576, by 
some verses prefixed to Gascoigne's satire, The Steele Glass, 
solid, stately, epigrammatic, by Walter Rawely of the Middle 
Temple. The style is his ; spelling of names matters nought in 
days in which a man would spell his own name three different 



12 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

ways in one document. Gascoigne, like Raleigh, knew Lord 
Grey of Wilton, and most men about town, too, and had been a 
soldier abroad, like Raleigh, probably with him. It seems to 
have been the fashion for young idlers to lodge among the Tem- 
plars ; indeed, toward the end of the century, they had to be 
cleared out, as crowding the wigs and gowns too much, and per- 
haps proving noisy neighbours, as Raleigh may have done. To 
this period may be referred, probably, his justice done on Mr. 
Charles Chester, (Ben Jonson's Carlo Bvffone^) " a perpetual 
talker, and made a noise like a drum in a room ; so one time, at 
a tavern, Raleigh beats him and seals up his mouth, his upper 
and nether beard, with hard wax." For there is a great laugh 
in Raleigh's heart, a genial contempt of asses ; and one that will 
make him enemies hereafter ; perhaps shorten his days. 

One hears of him next, (but only by report,) in the Nether- 
lands, under Norris, where the nucleus of the English army 
(especially of its musquetry) was training. For Don John of 
Austria intends not only to crush the liberties and creed of the 
Flemings, but afterwards to marry the Queen of Scots, and con- 
quer England ; and Elizabeth, unwillingly and slowly, for she 
cannot stomach rebels, has sent men and money to The States, 
to stop Don John in time ; which the valiant English and Scotch 
do on Lammas-day 1578, and that in a fashion till then unseen 
in war. For coming up late and panting, and " being more sen- 
sible of a little heat of the sun, than of any cold fear of death," 
they throw off their armour and clothes, and, in their shirts, (not 
over-clean, one fears,) give Don John's rashness such a rebuff, 
that two months more see that wild meteor, with lost hopes and 
tarnished fame, die down and vanish below the stormy horizon. 
In these days, probably, it is that he knew Colonel Bingham, a 
soldier of fortune, of a " fancy high and wild, too desultory and 
over-voluble," who had, among his hundred-and-one schemes, 
one for the plantation of America ; as poor Sir Thomas Stukely 
(whom Raleigh must have known well>) uncle of the traitor 
Lewis, had for the peopling of Florida. 

Raleigh returns : Ten years has he been learning his soldier's 
trade in silence. He will take a lesson in seamanship next. 
The Court may come in time ; for, by now, the poor squire's 
younger son must have discovered — perhaps even too fully — 
that he is not as other men are ; that he can speak, and watch, 
and dare, and endure, as none around him can do. However, 
here are " good adventures toward," as the Morte d'Arthur would 
say ; and he will off with his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert, to 
carry out his patent for planting Meta Incognita, — " The Un- 
known Goal," as Queen Elizabeth has named it, — which will 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 13 

prove to be too truly and fatally unknown. In a latitude south 
of England, and with an Italian summer, who can guess that the 
winter will out-freeze Russia itself? The merchant-seaman, 
like the statesman, had yet many a thing to learn. Instead of 
smiling at our forefathers' ignorance, let us honour the men who 
bought knowledge for us their children at the price of lives 
nobler than our own. 

So Raleigh goes on his voyage with Humphrey Gilbert, to 
carry out the patent for discovering and planting in u Meta In- 
cognita ; " but the voyage prospers not. A " smart brush with 
the Spaniards " sends them home again, with the loss of Morgan, 
their best captain, and " a tall ship," and Meta Incognita is for- 
gotten for a while : but not the Spaniards. Who are these who 
forbid all English, by virtue of the Pope's bull, to cross the At- 
lantic? That must be settled hereafter; and Raleigh, ever busy, 
is off to Ireland, to command a company in that " common-weal, 
or rather common-woe," as he calls it in a letter to Leicester. 
Two years and more pass here ; and all the records of him which 
remain are of a man, valiant, daring, and yet prudent beyond his 
fellows. He hates his work ; and is not on too good terms with 
stern and sour, but brave and faithful Lord Grey : but Lord 
Grey is Leicester's friend, and Raleigh works patiently under 
him, like a sensible man, because he is Leicester's friend. Some 
modern gentleman of note (we forget who, and do not care to 
recollect) says, that Raleigh's " prudence never bore any pro- 
portion to his genius." The next biographer we open accuses 
him of being too calculating, cunning, time-serving ; and so forth. 
Perhaps both are true. The man's was a character very likely 
to fall alternately into either sin, — doubtless, did so a hundred 
times. Perhaps both are false. The man's character was, on 
occasion, certain to rise above both faults. We have evidence 
that he did so his whole life long. 

He is bored with Ireland at last : nothing goes right there, 
(when has it ?) nothing is to be done there. That which is 
crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting can- 
not be numbered. He comes to London, and to Court. But 
how ? By spreading his cloak over a muddy place for Queen 
Elizabeth to step on ? It is a pretty story ; very likely to be a 
true one : but biographers have slurred a few facts in their hurry 
to carry out their theory of " favourites," and to prove that Eliz- 
abeth took up Raleigh on the same grounds that the silliest 
boarding-school miss might have done. Not that we deny the 
cloak story, if true, to be a very pretty story ; perhaps it justi- 
fies, taken alone, Elizabeth's fondness for him. There may have 
been self-interest in it ; we are bound, as " men of the world," 



14 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

to impute the dirtiest motive that we can find : but how many- 
self-interested men do we know, who would have had quickness 
and daring to do such a thing ? Men who are thinking about 
themselves are not generally either so quick-witted, or so inclined 
to throw away a good cloak, when by much scraping and saving 
they have got one. We never met a cunning, selfish, ambitious 
man who would have done such a thing. The reader may : but 
even if he has, we must ask him, for Queen Elizabeth's sake, to 
consider that this young Quixote is the close relation of two of 
the finest public men then living, Champernoun and Carew. 
That he is a friend of Sidney ; a pet of Leicester ; that he has 
left behind him at Oxford, and brought with him from Ireland, 
the reputation of being a vara avis, a new star in the firmament ; 
that he has been a soldier in her Majesty's service (and in one 
in which she has a peculiar private interest) for twelve years ; 
that he has held her commission as one of the triumvirate for 
governing Munster, and been the commander of the garrison at 
Cork ; and that it is possible that she may have heard something 
of him before he threw his cloak under her feet, especially as 
there has been some controversy" (which we have in vain tried 
to fathom) between him and Lord Grey about that terrible Smer- 
wick slaughter ; of the result of which we know little, but that 
Raleigh, being called in question about it in London, made such 
good play with his tongue, that his reputation as an orator and 
a man of talent was fixed once and for ever. 

Within the twelve months he is sent on some secret diplomatic 
mission about the Anjou marriage ; he is in fact now installed 
in his place as " a favourite." And why not ? If a man is found 
to be wise and witty, ready and useful, able to do whatsoever he 
is put to, why is a sovereign, who has eyes to see the man's 
worth, and courage to use it, to be accused of I know not what, 
because the said man happens to be good-looking ? Of all gen- 
erations, this, one would think, ought to be the last to cry out 
against " favouritism " in government : but we will draw no 
odious comparisons, because readers can draw them but too easily 
for themselves. 

Now comes the turning-point of Raleigh's life. What does 
he intend to be ? Soldier, statesman, scholar, or sea-adventurer ? 
He takes the most natural, yet not the wisest course. He will 
try and be all four at once. He has intellect for it ; by worldly 
wisdom he may have money for it also. Even now he has con- 
trived (no one can tell whence) to build a good bark of two 
hundred tons, and send her out with Humphrey Gilbert on his 
second and fatal voyage. Luckily for Raleigh she deserts and 
comes home, while not yet out of the Channel, or she had surely 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 15 

gone the way of the rest of Gilbert's squadron. Raleigh, of 
course, loses money by the failure, as well as the hopes which 
he had grounded on his brother's Transatlantic viceroyalty. 
And a bitter pang it must have been to him, to find himself 
bereft of that pure and heroic counsellor, just at his entering 
into life. But with the same elasticity which sent him to the 
grave, he is busy within six months in a fresh expedition. If 
Meta Incognita be not worth planting, there must be, so Raleigh 
thinks, a vast extent of coast between it and Florida, which is 
more genial in climate, perhaps more rich in produce ; and he 
sends Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow to look for the same, 
and not in vain. 

On these Virginian discoveries we shall say but little. Those 
who wish to enjoy them should read them in all their naive 
freshness in the originals ; they will subscribe to S. T. Cole- 
ridge's dictum, that no one now-a-days can write travels as well 
as the old worthies could, who figure in Hakluyt and Purchas. 

But we return to the question, What does this man intend to 
be ? A discoverer and colonist ; a vindicator of some part at 
least of America from Spanish claims ? We fear not altogether, 
else he would have gone himself to Virginia, at least the second 
voyage, instead of sending others. But here, it seems to us, is 
the fatal, and yet pardonable mistake, which haunts the man 
throughout. He tries to be too many men at once. Fatal : 
because, though he leaves his trace on more things than (per- 
haps) did ever one man before or since, he, strictly speaking, 
conquers nothing, brings nothing to a consummation. Virginia, 
Guiana, the History of the World, his own career as a statesman 
— as king, (for he might have been king had he chosen,) all are 
left unfinished. And yet most pardonable ; for if a man feels 
that he can do many different things, how hard to teach himself 
that he must not do them all ! How hard to say to himself, " I 
must cut off the right hand, and pluck out the right eye?* r I 
must be less than myself, in order really to be any thing. I must 
concentrate my powers on one subject, and that perhaps by no 
means the most seemingly noble or useful, still less the most 
pleasant, and forego so many branches of activity in which I 
might be so distinguished, so useful." This is a hard lesson. 
Raleigh took just sixty-six years learning it, and had to carry 
the result of his experience to the other side of the dark river, 
for there was no time left to use it on this side. Some readers 
may have learnt the lesson already. If so, happy and blessed 
are they. But let them not, therefore," exalt themselves above 
Walter Raleigh ; for that lesson is (of course) soonest learnt by 
the man who can excel in few things, later by him who can 



16 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

excel in many, and latest of all by him who, like Raleigh, can 
excel in all. 

Space prevents us from going into details about the earlier 
court-days of Raleigh. He rises rapidly, as we have seen. He 
has an estate given him in Ireland, near his friend Spenser, 
where he tries to do well and wisely, colonizing, tilling, and 
planting it ; but, like his Virginia expeditions, principally at 
second hand. For he has swallowed (there is no denying it) 
the painted bait. He will discover, he will colonize, he will do 
all manner of beautiful things, at second hand : but he himself 
will be a courtier. It is very tempting. Who would not, at 
the age of thirty, have wished to have been one of that chosen 
band of geniuses and heroes whom Elizabeth had gathered round 
her ? Who would not, at the age of thirty, have given his pound 
of flesh to be captain of her guard, and to go with her whither- 
soever she went ? It is not merely the intense gratification to 
carnal vanity (which, if any man denies or scoffs at, we always 
mark him down as especially guilty) which is to be considered ; 
but the real, actual honour, in the mind of one wdio looked on 
Elizabeth as the most precious and glorious being which the 
earth had seen for centuries. To be appreciated by her ; to be 
loved by her ; to serve her ; to guard her ; what could man 
desire more on earth? 

Beside, he becomes a member of Parliament now, and Lord 
Warden of the Stannaries ; business w T hich of course keeps him 
in England : business w T hich he performs (as he does all things) 
wisely and well. Such a generation as this ought really to 
respect Raleigh a little more, if it be only for his excellence 
in their own especial sphere — that of business. Raleigh is a 
thorough man of business. He can " toil terribly," and what is 
more, toil to the purpose. In all the everyday affairs of life, he 
remains without a blot ; a diligent, methodical, prudent man, who, 
though he plays for great stakes, ventures and loses his whole 
fortune again and again, yet never seems to omit the " doing the 
duty which lies nearest him ; " never gets into mean money 
scrapes ; never neglects tenants or duty ; never gives way for 
one instant to " the eccentricities of genius." 

If he had done so, be sure that we should have heard of it. 
For no man can become what he has become without making 
many an enemy ; and he has his enemies already. On which 
statement naturally occurs the question — why? An important 
question too ; because several of his later biographers seem to 
have running in their minds some such train of thought as this — 
Raleigh must have been a bad fellow, or he would not have had 
so many enemies ; and because he w r as a bad fellow, there is an 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 17 

a priori reason that charges against him are true. Whether 
this be arguing in a circle or not, it is worth searching out the 
beginning of this enmity, and the reputed causes of it. In after 
years it will be, because he is " damnable proud ; " because he 
hated Essex, and so forth : of which in their places. But what 
is the earliest count against him ? Naunton (who hated Raleigh, 
and was moreover a rogue and a bad fellow) has no reason to 
give, but that the queen took him for a kind of oracle, which 
much nettled them all ; yea, those he relied on began to take 
this his sudden favour for an alarm ; to be sensible of their own 
supplantation, and to project his ; which shortly made him to 
sing, " Fortune my foe." 

Now, be this true or not, and we do not put much faith in it, 
it gives no reason for the early dislike of Raleigh, save the some- 
what unsatisfactory one which Cain would have given for his 
dislike of Abel. Moreover, Mr. Tytler gives a letter of Essex's, 
written as thoroughly in the Cain spirit as any we ever read, 
and we wonder that after, as he says, first giving that letter to 
the world, he could have found courage to repeat the old senti- 
mentalism about the " noble and unfortunate" Earl. His hatred 
of Raleigh (which, as we shall see hereafter, Raleigh not only 
bears patiently, but requites with good deeds as long as he can) 
springs, by his own confession, simply from envy and disap- 
pointed vanity. The spoilt boy insults Queen Elizabeth about 
her liking for the " knave Raleigh." She, " taking hold of one 
word disdain," tells Essex that " there was no such cause why I 
should thus disdain him." On which, says Essex, " as near as I 
could I did describe unto her what he had been, and what he 
was ; and then I did let her see, whether I had come to disdain 
his competition of love, or whether I could have comfort to give 
myself over to the service of a mistress that was in awe of such 
a man. I spake for grief and choler as much against him as I 
could : and I think he standing at the door might very well hear 
the worst that I spoke of him. In the end, I saw she was re- 
solved to defend him, and to cross me." Whereon follows a 
" scene," the naughty boy raging and stamping, till he insults 
the Queen, and calls Raleigh u a wretch;" whereon poor Eliza- 
beth, who loved the coxcomb for his father's sake, " turned 
her away to my Lady Warwick," and Essex goes grumbling 
forth. 

On which letter, written before a single charge has been 
brought, (as far as yet known, against Raleigh,) Mr. Tytler can 
only observe, that it u throws much light on the jealousy " between 
Raleigh and Essex, " and establishes the fact, that Elizabeth de- 
lighted to see them competing for her love." 



18 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

This latter sentence is one of those (too common) which rouse 
our indignation. We have quoted only the passage which Mr. 
Tytler puts in italics, as proving his case ; but let any reader 
examine that letter word by word, from end to end, and say 
whether even Essex, in the midst of his passion, selfishness, and 
hatred, lets one word drop which hints at Elizabeth " delighting " 
in seeing the competition, any more than one which brings a 
tangible charge against Raleigh. It is as gratuitous and wanton 
a piece of evil-speaking as we ever read in any book ; yet, we 
are ashamed to say, it is but an average specimen of the fairness 
with which any fact is treated now-a-days, which relates to the 
greatest sovereign whom England ever saw, the " Good Queen 
Bess," of whom Cromwell the regicide never spoke without the 
deepest respect and admiration. 

Raleigh's next few years are brilliant and busy ones ; and 
gladly, did space permit us, would we give details of those bril- 
liant adventures which make this part of his life that of a true 
knight-errant. But they are mere episodes in the history, and 
we must pass them quickly by, only saying that they corroborate 
in all things our original notion of the man — just, humane, wise, 
greatly daring and enduring greatly ; and filled with the one 
fixed idea, which has grown with his growth, and strengthened 
with his strength, the destruction of the Spanish power, and colo- 
nization of America by English. His brother Humphrey makes 
a second attempt to colonize Newfoundland, and perishes as hero- 
ically as he had lived. Raleigh, undaunted by his own loss in 
the adventure and his brother's failure, sends out a fleet of his 
own to discover to the southward, and finds Virginia. We might 
spend pages on this beautiful episode on the simple descriptions 
of the fair new land which the sea-kings bring home ; on the 
profound (for those times at least) knowledge which prompted 
Raleigh to make the attempt in that particular direction, which 
had as yet escaped the notice of the Spaniards ; on the quiet 
patience with which, undaunted by the ill-success of the first . 
colonists, he sends out fleet after fleet, to keep the hold which he 
had once gained, till, unable any longer to support the huge ex- 
pense, he makes over his patent for discovery to a company of 
merchants, who fare for many years as ill as Raleigh himself 
did : but one thing we have a right to say, that to this one man, 
under the providence of Almighty God, do the whole United 
States of America owe their existence. The work was double. 
The colony, however small, had to be kept in possession at all 
hazards ; and he did it. But that was not enough. Spain must 
be prevented from extending her operations northward from 
Florida ; she must be crippled along the whole east coast of 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 19 

America. And Raleigh did that too. We find him for years 
to come a part-adventurer in almost every attack on the Span- 
iards ; we find him preaching war against them on these very 
grounds, and setting others to preach it also. Good old Hariot 
(Raleigh's mathematical tutor, whom he sent to Virginia) re- 
echoes his pupil's trumpet-blast. Hooker, in his epistle dedica- 
tory of his Irish History, strikes the same note, and a right noble 
one it is. " These Spaniards are trying to build up a world-tyr- 
anny by rapine and cruelty. You, sir, call on us to deliver the 
earth from them, by doing justly and loving mercy ; and we will 
obey you ! " is the answer which Raleigh receives (as far as we 
can find) from every nobler-natured Englishman. 

It was an immense conception : a glorious one : it stood out 
so clear : there was no mistake about its being the absolutely 
right, wise, patriotic thing : and so feasible, too, if Raleigh could 
but find " six cents hommes qui savaient mourir." But that was 
just what he could not find. He could draw round him, and did, 
by the spiritual magnetism of his genius, many a noble soul : 
but he could not organize them, as he seems to have tried to do, 
into a coherent body. The English spirit of independent action, 
never stronger than in that age, and most wisely encouraged (for 
other reasons) by good Queen Bess, was too strong for him. 
His pupils will " fight on their own hook " like so many Yankee 
rangers ; quarrel with each other ; grumble at him. For the 
truth is, he demands of them too high a standard of thought and 
purpose. He is often a whole heaven above them in the huge- 
ness of his imagination, the nobleness of his motive ; and Don 
Quixote can often find no better squire than Sancho Panza. 
Even glorious Sir Richard Grenvil makes a mess of it; burns 
an Indian village because they steal a silver cup ; throws back 
the colonization of Virginia ten years with his over-strict notions 
of discipline and retributive justice ; and Raleigh requites him 
for his offence by embalming him, his valour and his death, not 
in immortal verse but in immortal prose. The True Relation 
of the Fight at the Azores, gives the key-note of Raleigh's heart. 
If readers will not take that as the text on which his whole life 
is a commentary, they may know a great deal about him, but 
him they will never know. 

The game becomes fiercer and fiercer. Blow and counter- 
blow between the Spanish king (for the whole West-Indian 
commerce was a government job) and the merchant-nobles of 
England. At last, the Great Armada comes, and the Great 
Armada goes again. Venit, vidit, fugit, as the medals said of 
it. And to Walter Raleigh's counsel, by the testimony of all 
contemporaries, the mighty victory is to be principally attributed. 



20 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Where all men did heroically, it were invidious to bestow on 
him alone a crown, ob patriam servatam. But henceforth, Eliz- 
abeth knows well that she has not been mistaken in her choice ; 
and Raleigh is better loved than ever, heaped with fresh wealth 
and honours. And who deserves them better ? 

The immense value of his services in the defence of England 
excuses him, in our eyes, from the complaint which one has been 
often inclined to bring against him, — why, instead of sending 
others westward ho, did he not go himself? Surely he could 
have reconciled the jarring instruments with which he was work- 
ing. He could have organized such a body of men as perhaps 
never went out before or since on the same errand. He could 
have done all that Cortez did, and more ; and done it more justly 
and mercifully. 

True. And here seems (as far as little folk dare judge great 
folk) to have been his mistake. He is too wide for real success. 
He has too many plans ; he is fond of too many pursuits. The 
man who succeeds is generally the narrow man ; the man of one 
idea, who works at nothing but that ; sees every thing only 
through the light of that ; sacrifices every thing to that ; the 
fanatic, in short. By fanatics, whether military, commercial, or 
religious, and not by "liberal-minded men " at all, has the world's 
work been done in all ages. Amid the modern cants, one of 
the most mistaken is the cant about the "mission of genius," 
the " mission of the poet." Poets, we hear in some quarters, 
are the anointed kings of mankind, — at least, so the little poets 
sing, each to his little fiddle. There is no greater mistake. It 
is the practical, prosaical fanatic who does the work ; and the 
poet, if he tries to do it, is certain to put down his spade every 
five minutes, to look at the prospect, and pick flowers, and 
moralize on dead asses, till he ends a " JNTeron malgre lui-meme," 
fiddling melodiously while Rome is burning. And perhaps this 
is the secret of Raleigh's failure. He is a fanatic no doubt, 
a true knight-errant : but he is too much of a poet withal. 
The sense of beauty inthrals him at every step. Gloriana's 
fairy court, with its chivalries and its euphuisms, its masques 
and its tourneys, and he the most charming personage in it, are 
too charming for him — as they would have been for us, reader ; 
and he cannot give them up, and go about the. one work. He 
justifies his double-mindedness to himself, no doubt, as he does 
to the world, by working wisely, indefatigably, bravely ; but 
still he has put his trust in princes, and in the children of men. 
His sin, as far as we can see, is not against man, but against 
God : one which we do not now-a-days call a sin, but a weak- 
ness. Be it so. God punished him for it, swiftly and sharply ; 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 21 

which we hold to be a sure sign that God also forgave him 
for it. 

■ So he stays at home, spends, sooner or later, £40,000 on Vir- 
ginia, writes charming court-poetry with Oxford, Buck hurst, and 
Paget, brings over Spenser from Ireland, and introduces Colin 
Clout to Gloriana, who loves — as who would not have loved ? — 
that most beautiful of faces and of souls ; helps poor puritan 
Uclall out of his scrape as far as he can ; begs for Captain Spring, 
begs for many more, whose names are only known by being con- 
nected with some good deed of his. " When, Sir Walter," asks 
Queen Bess, " will you cease to be a beggar ? " " When your 
Majesty ceases to be a benefactor." Perhaps it is in these days 
that he sets up his " office of address," — some sort of agency for 
discovering and relieving the wants of worthy men. So all 
seems to go well. If he has lost in Virginia, he has gained by 
Spanish prizes ; his wine-patent is bringing him in a large 
revenue, and the heavens smile on him. u Thou sayest, I am 
rich, and increased in goods, and have need of nothing ; and 
knowest not that thou art poor and miserable and blind and 
naked." Thou shalt learn it, then, and pay dearly for thy lesson. 

For, in the meanwhile, Raleigh falls into a very great sin, for 
which, as usual with his elect, God inflicts swift and instant pun- 
ishment ; on which, as usual, biographers talk much unwisdom. 
He seduces Miss Throgmorton, one of the maids of honour. 
Elizabeth is very wroth ; and had she not good reason to be 
wroth ? Is it either fair or reasonable to talk of her " demanding 
a monopoly of love," and " being incensed at the temerity of her 
favourite, in presuming to fall in love and marry without her 
consent ? " Away with such prurient cant. The plain facts are : 
that a man nearly forty years old abuses his wonderful gifts of 
body and mind, to ruin a girl nearly twenty years younger than 
himself. What wonder if a virtuous woman (and Queen Eliza- 
beth was virtuous) thought it a base deed, and punished it accord- 
ingly ? There is no more to be discovered in the matter, save 
by the vulturine nose, which smells a carrion in every rose-bud. 
Raleigh has a great attempt on the Plate-fleets in hand ; he har- 
ries off, from Chatham, and writes to young Cecil, on the 10th 
of March, " I mean not to come away, as some say I will, for 
fear of a marriage, and I know not what. . . . For I pro- 
test before God, there is none on the face of the earth that I 
would be fastened unto." 

This famous passage is one of those over which the virtuosity 
of modern times, rejoicing in evil, has hung so fondly, as giving 
melancholy proof of the u duplicity of Raleigh's character;" as 
if a man who once in his life had told an untruth was proved by 



22 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

that fact to be a rogue from birth to death: while others have 
kindly given him the benefit of a doubt whether the letter were 
not written after a private marriage, and therefore Raleigh, 
being "joined unto" some one already, had a right to say, that 
he did not wish to be joined to any one. But we do not con- 
cur in this doubt. Four months after, Sir Edward Stafford 
writes to Anthony Bacon, " If you have any thing to do with Sir 
W. R., or any love to make to Mistress Throgmorton, at the 
Tower to-morrow you may speak with them." This implies that 
no marriage had yet taken place. And surely, if there had been 
a private marriage, two people who were about to be sent to the 
Tower for their folly would have made the marriage public at 
once, as the only possible self-justification. But it is a pity, in 
our opinion, that biographers, before pronouncing upon that sup- 
posed lie of Raleigh's, had taken the trouble to find out what 
the words mean. In their virtuous haste to prove him a liar, 
they have overlooked the fact that the words, as they stand, are 
unintelligible, and the argument self-contradictory. He wants 
to prove, we suppose, that he does not go to sea for fear of being 
forced to marry Miss Throgmorton. It is, at least, an unexpected 
method of so doing in a shrewd man like Raleigh, to say that he 
wishes to marry no one at all. " Don't think that I run away 
for fear of a marriage, for I do not wish to marry any one on the 
face of the earth," is a speech which may prove Raleigh to have 
been a goose, but we must understand it before we can say that 
it proves him a rogue. If we had received such *a letter from a 
friend, we should have said at once, " Why the man, in his hurry 
and confusion, has omitted the word; he must have meant to 
write, not c There is none on the face of the earth that I would 
be fastened to,' but ' There is none on the face of the earth that 
I would rather be fastened to,' " which would at once make sense, 
and suit fact. For Raleigh not only married Miss Throgmorton 
forthwith, but made her the best of husbands. Our conjectural 
emendation may go for what it is worth ; but that the passage, as 
it stands in Murdin's State Papers (the MSS. we have not seen) 
is either misquoted, or miswritten by Raleigh himself, we cannot 
doubt. He was not one to think nonsense, even if he scribbled it. 
The Spanish raid turns out well. Raleigh overlooks Eliza- 
beth's letters of recall till he finds out that the king of Spain has 
stopped the Plate-fleet for fear of his coming, and then returns, 
sending on Sir John Burrough to the Azores, where he takes The 
Great Carack, the largest prize (1600 tons) which had ever 
been brought into England. We would that space allowed of 
a sketch of that gallant fight as it stands in the pages of Hak- 
luyt. Suffice it that it raised Raleigh once more to wealth, 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 23 

though not to favour. Shortly after he returns from the sea, he 
finds himself, where he deserves to be, in the Tower, where he 
does more than one thing which brought him no credit. How 
far we are justified in calling his quarrel with Sir George Carew, 
his keeper, for not letting him " disguise himself, and get into a 
pair of oars to ease his mind but with a sight of the queen, or 
his heart would break," hypocrisy, is a very different matter. 
Honest Arthur Gorges, (a staunch friend of Raleigh's,) tells the 
story laughingly and lovingly, as if he thought Raleigh sincere, 
but somewhat mad ; and yet honest Gorges has a good right to 
say a bitter thing ; for after having been " ready to break with 
laughing at seeing them two braw r l and scramble like madmen, 
and Sir George's new periwig torn off his crown," he sees " the 
iron walking " and daggers out, and, playing the part of him who 
taketh a dog by the ears, " purchased such a rap on the knuckles, 
that I wished both their pates broken, and so with much ado 
they staid their brawl to see my bloody fingers," and then set to 
work to abuse the hapless peacemaker. After which things 
Raleigh w 7 rites a letter to Cecil, which is still more offensive in 
the eyes of virtuous biographers, — how "his heart was never 
broken till this day, when he hears the queen goes so far off, 
whom he followed with love and desire on so many journeys, and 
am now left behind in a dark prison all alone." . ..." I 
that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like 
Diana, walking like Yenus, the gentle w r ind blowing her fair hair 
about her pure cheeks," and so forth, in a style in which the 
vulturine nose must needs scent carrion, just because the roses 
are more fragrant than the vulturine taste should be in a world 
where all ought to be either vultures, or carrion for their dinners. 
As for his despair, had he not good reason to be in despair ? By 
his own sin, he has hurled himself down the hill which he has so 
painfully climbed. He is in the Tower — surely no pleasant or 
hopeful place for any man. Elizabeth is exceeding wroth with 
him ; and what is worse, he deserves what he has got. His 
whole fortune is ventured in an expedition over which he has no 
control, which has been unsuccessful in its first object, and may 
be altogether unsuccessful in that which it has undertaken as a 
pis-aller, and so leave him penniless. There want not, too, those 
who will trample on the fallen. The deputy has been cruelly 
distraining on his Irish tenants for a " supposed debt of his to 
the Queen of £400 for rent," which was indeed but fifty merks, 
and which w r as paid, and has carried off 500 milch kine from the 
poor settlers whom he has planted there, and forcibly thrust him 
out of possession of a castle. 

Moreover, the whole Irish estates are likely to come to ruin, 



24 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

for nothing prevails but rascality among the English soldiers, im- 
potence among the governors, and rebellion among the natives. 
Three thousand Burkes are up in arms ; his " prophecy of this 
rebellion " ten days ago was laughed at, and now has come true ; 
and altogether, Walter Raleigh and all belonging to him is in as 
evil case as was ever man on earth. No wonder, poor fellow, if 
he behowls himself lustily, and not always wisely, to Cecil, and 
every one else who will listen to him. 

As for his fine speeches about Elizabeth, why forget the 
standing-point from which such speeches were made ? Over 
and above his present ruin, it was, (and ought to have been,) an 
utterly horrible and unbearable thing to Raleigh, or any man, to 
have fallen into disgrace with Elizabeth by his own fault. He 
feels (and perhaps rightly) that he is as it were excommunicate 
from England, and the mission and the glory of England. Instead 
of being as he was till now, one of a body of brave men work- 
ing together in one great common cause, he has cut himself off 
from the congregation by his own selfish lust, and there he is left 
alone w r ith his shame and his selfishness. We must try to realize 
to ourselves the way in which such men as Raleigh looked not 
only at Elizabeth, but at all the world. There was, in plain 
palpable fact, something about her, her history, her policy, the 
times, the glorious part which England, and she as the incarna- 
tion of the then English spirit, was playing upon earth, which 
raised imaginative and heroical souls into a permanent exaltation 
— a " fairy-land," as they called it themselves, which seems to us 
fantastic, and would be fantastic in us, because we are not at 
their work, or in their days. There can be no doubt that a num- 
ber of as noble men as ever stood together on the earth, did 
worship this woman, fight for her, toil for her, risk all for her, 
with a pure chivalrous affection which to us furnished one of the 
beautiful pages in all the book of history. Blots there mu^ 
needs have been, and inconsistencies, selfishnesses, follies ; for 
they too were men of like passions with ourselves; but let us 
look at the fair vision as a whole, and thank God that such a 
thing has for once existed even imperfectly on this sinful earth, 
instead of playing the part of Ham, and falling under his curse ; 
the penalty of slavishness, cowardice, loss of noble daring, which 
surely falls on any generation which is " banausos," to use Aris- 
totle's word — which rejoices in its forefathers' shame, and, unable 
to believe in the nobleness of others, is unable to become noble 
itself. 

As for the "Alexander and Diana " affectations, they were the 
language of the time ; and certainly this generation has no rea- 
son to find fault with them, or with a good deal more of the 



SIR V." ALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 25 

" affectations " and " flattery " of Elizabethan times,, while it 
listens complacently night after night to " honourable members I 
complimenting not Queen Elizabeth, but Sir Jabesh Windbag, 
Fiddle, Faddle, Red-tape, and party, with protestations of deepest 
respect and fullest confidence *in the very speeches in which they 
bring accusations of every offence, short of high -treason — to be 
understood, of course, in a " parliamentary sense," as Mr. Pick- 
wick's were in a " Pickwickian " one. If a generation of Knoxes 
and Mortons, Burleighs and Ealeighs, shall ever arise again, one 
wonders by what name they will call the parliamentary morality, 
and parliamentary courtesy of a generation which has meted out 
such measure to their antitypes' failings ? 

" But Queen Elizabeth was an old woman then." TTe thank 
the objector even for that u then ; " for it is much now-a-days to 
find any one who believes that Queen Elizabeth was ever young, 
or who does not talk of her as if she was born about seventy 
years of age, covered with rouge and wrinkles. We will under- 
take to say. that as to the beauty of this woman there is a greater 
mass of testimony, and from the very best judges too. than there 
is of the beauty of any personage in history ; and jet it has be- 
come the fashion now to deny even that. The plain facts seem, 
that she was very graceful, active, accomplished in all outward 
matters, of a perfect figure, and of that style of intellectual beauty, 
depending on expression, which attracted (and we trust always 
will attract) Britons, far more than that merely sensuous loveli- 
ness in which no doubt Mary Stuart far surpassed her. And there 
seems little doubt, that like many Englishwomen, she retained 
her beauty to a very late period in life, not to mention that she 
was, in 1592. just at that age of rejuvenescence which makes 
many a woman more lovely at sixty than she has been since site 
was thirty-five. Xo doubt, too, she used every artificial means 
to preserve her famous complexion ; and quite right she was. 
This beauty of hers had been a talent (as all beauty i>) com- 
mitted to her by God ; it had been an important element in her 
great success ; men had accepted it as what beauty of form and 
expression generally is, an outward and visible sign of the in- 
ward and spiritual grace ; and while the inward was unchanged, 
what wonder if she tried to preserve the outward ? If she was 
the same, why should she not try to look the same ? And what 
blame to those who worshipped her, if, knowing that she was the 
same, they too should fancy that she looked the same — the 
Elizabeth of their youth, and talk as if the fair flesh, as well as 
the fair spirit, was immortal ? Does not every loving husband 
do so, when he forgets the gray hair and the sunken cheek, and 
all the wastes of time, and sees the partner of many joys and 
2 



26 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

sorrows not as slie lias become, but as she was, ay, and is to 
him, and will be to him, he trusts, through all eternity ? There 
is no feeling in these Elizabethan worshippers which we heve 
not seen, potential and crude, again and again in the best and 
noblest of young men whom we have met, till it was crushed 
in them by the luxury of effeminacy and unbelief in chivalry, 
which is the sure accompaniment of a long peace ; which war 
may burn up with beneficent fire; which, to judge by the un- 
expected heroisms and chivalries of the last six months, it is 
burning up already. 

But we must hasten on now ; for Raleigh is out of prison in 
September, and by the next spring in parliament, speaking 
, wiseb and well, especially on his fixed idea, war with Spain, 
which he is rewarded for forthwith in Father Papon's Andrea 
Philopatris Responsio, by a charge of founding a school of 
Atheism for the corruption of young gentlemen ; a charge which 
Lord Chief- Justice Popham, Protestant as he is, will find it use- 
ful Ox.e day to recollect. 

Elizabeth, however, now that he has married the fair Throg- 
morton, and does wisely in other matters, restores him to favour. 
If he has sinned, he has suffered : but he is as useful as ever, 
now that his senses have returned to him, and he is making 
good speeches in parliament, instead of bad ones to weak maidens ; 
and we find him once more in favour, and possessor of Sher- 
borne Manor, where he builds and beautifies, with " groves and 
gardens of much variety and great delight." And God, too, 
seems to have forgiven him ; perhaps has forgiven ; for there 
the fair Throgmorton brings him a noble boy. Ui sis vitalis 
metuo, puer ! " 

Raleigh will quote David's example one day, not wisely or 
well. Does David's example ever cross him now, and these sad 
words, — " The Lord hath put away thy sin, . . . neverthe- 
less the child that is born unto thee shall die ? " 

Let that be as it may, all is sunshine once more. Sherborne 
Manor, a rich share in the great carack, a beautiful wife, a child ; 
what more does this man want to make him happy ? Why 
should he not settle down upon his lees, like ninety-nine out of 
the hundred, or at least try a peaceful and easy path toward more 
" praise and pudding ? " The world answers, or, his biographers 
- answer for him, that he needs to reinstate himself in his mis- 
tress's affection ; which is true or not, according as we take it. 
If they mean thereby, as most seem to mean, that it was a mere 
selfish and ambitious scheme by which to wriggle into court 
favour once more — why, let them mean it: we shall only ob- 
serve, that the method which Raleigh took was a rather more 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 27 

dangerous and self-sacrificing one than courtiers are wont to take. 
But if it be meant that Walter Raleigh spoke somewhat thus 
with himself, — " I have done a base and dirty deed, and have 
been punished for it. I have hurt the good name of a sweet 
woman who loves me, and whom I find to be a treasure ; and 
God, instead of punishing me by taking her from me, has ren- 
dered me good for evil by giving her to me. I have justly 
offended a mistress whom I worship, and who, after having 
shown her just indignation, has returned me evil for good by 
giving me these fair lands of Sherborne, and only forbid me her 
presence till the scandal has passed away. She sees, and re- 
wards my good in spite of my evil ; and I, too, know that I am 
better than I have seemed ; that I am fit for nobler deeds than 
seducing maids of honour. How can I prove that ? How can 
I redeem my lost name for patriotism and public daring ? How 
can I win glory for my wife, seek that men shall forget her past 
shame in the thought, ' She is Walter Raleigh's wife ? ' -How 
can I show my mistress that I loved her all along, that I ac- 
knowledge her bounty, her mingled justice and mercy ? How 
can I render to God for all the benefits which He has clone unto 
me ? How can I do a deed the like of which was never done in 
England ? " 

If all this had passed through Walter Raleigh's mind, what 
could we say of it, but that it was the natural and rational feel- 
ing of an honourable and right-hearted man, burning to ri^e to 
the level which he knew ougiit to be his, because he knew that 
he had fallen below it ? And what right better way of testify- 
ing these feelings than to do what, as we shall see, Raleigh did ? 
AYhat right have we to impute to him lower motives than these, 
while we confess that these righteous and noble motives would 
have been natural and rational; — indeed, just what we flatter 
ourselves that we should have felt in his place ? Of course, in 
his grand scheme, the thought came in, " And I shall win to 
myself honour, and glory, and wealth," — of course. And pray, 
sir, does it not come in in your grand schemes ; and yours ; and 
yours ? If you made a fortune to-morrow by some wisely and 
benevolently managed factory, would you forbid all speech of 
the said wisdom and benevolence, because you had intended that 
wisdom and benevolence should pay you a good percentage ? 
Are Price's Patent Candle Company the less honourable and 
worthy men, because their righteousness has proved to be a good 
investment ? Away with cant, and let him that is without sin 
among you cast the first stone. 

So Raleigh hits upon a noble project ; a desperate one, true : 
but he will do it or die. He will leave pleasant Sherborne, and 



28 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

the bosom of the beautiful bride, and the first-born son ; and all 
which to most makes life worth having, and which Raleigh en- 
joys more intensely (for he is a poet, and a man of strong ner- 
vous passions withal) than most men. But, — 

" I eould not love thee, dear, so much, 
Loved I not honour more." 

And he will go forth to endure heat, hunger, fever, danger of 
death in battle, danger of the Inquisition, rack and stake, in 
search of El Dorado. What so strange in that ? We have 
known half-a-dozen men who, in his case, and conscious of his 
powers, would have done the same from the same noble motive. 

He begins prudently ; and sends a Devonshire man, Captain 
Whiddon, (probably one of the Whiddons of beautiful Chagford,) 
to spy out the Orinoco. He finds that the Spaniards are there 
already ; that Berreo, who has attempted El Dorado from the 
westward, starting from New Granada and going down the rivers, 
is trying to settle on the Orinoco mouth ; that he is hanging the 
poor natives, encouraging the Caribs to hunt them and sell them 
for slaves, imprisoning the Caciques to extort their gold, tortur- 
ing, ravishing, kidnapping, and conducting himself as was usual 
among Spaniards of those days. 

Raleigh's spirit is stirred within him. If " Uncle Tom's 
Cabin" excites our just wrath, how must the history of such 
things have excited Raleigh's, as he remembered that these 
Spaniards are as yet triumphant in iniquity, and as he remem- 
bered, too, that these same men are the sworn foes of England, 
her liberty, her Bible, and her queen ? What a deed, to be 
beforehand with them for once ! To dispossess them of one 
corner of that western world, where they have left no trace but 
blood and flame ! He will go himself ; he will find El Dorado 
and its golden Emperor; and, instead of conquering, plundering, 
and murdering him, as Cortez did Montezuma, and Pizarro Ata- 
kuallpa, he will show him English strength, espouse his quarrel 
against the Spaniards ; make him glad to become Queen Eliza- 
beth's vassal tributary, leave him perhaps a body guard of Eng- 
lish veterans, perhaps colonize his country, and so at once avenge 
and protect the oppressed Indians, and fill the Queen's treasury 
with the riches of a land equal, if not superior, to Peru and 
Mexico. 

Such is his dream ; vague, perhaps : but far less vague than 
those with which Cortez and Pizarro started, and succeeded. 
After a careful survey of the whole matter, we give it as our 
deliberate opinion, that Raleigh was more reasonable in his 
attempt, and had more fair evidence of its feasibility, than either 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 29 

Cortez or Pizarro had for theirs. It is a bold assertion. If any 
reader doubts its truth, he cannot do better than to read the 
whole of the documents connected with the two successful, and 
the one unsuccessful, attempts at finding a golden kingdom. 
Let them read first Prescott's Conquests at Mexico and Peru, 
and then Schomburgk's edition of Raleigh's Guiana. They will 
at least confess, when they have finished, that truth is stranger 
than fiction. 

Of Raleigh's credulity in believing in El Dorado, much has 
been said. We are sorry to find even so wise a man as Sir 
Richard Schomburgk, after bearing good testimony to Raleigh's 
wonderful accuracy about all matters which he had an opportu- 
nity of observing, using this term of credulity. We will do battle 
on that point even with Sir Richard, and ask by what right the 
word is used ? First, Raleigh says nothing about El Dorado, (as 
every one is forced to confess,) but what Spaniard on Spaniard 
had been saying for fifty years. So the blame of credulity ought 
to rest with the Spaniards, from Philip von Huten, Orellana, and 
George of Spires, upward to Berreo. But it rests really with no 
one. For nothing, if we will examine the documents, is told of 
the riches of El Dorado which had not been found to be true, and 
seen by the eyes of men still living, in Peru and Mexico. Not 
one tenth of America had been explored, and already two El 
Dorados had been found and conquered. What more rational 
than to suppose that there was a third, a fourth, a fifth, in the 
remaining eight tenths ? The reports of El Dorado among the 
savages were just of the same kind as those by which Cortez and 
Pizarro hunted out Mexico and Peru, saving that they were far 
more widely spread, and confirmed by a succession of adven- 
turers. We entreat readers to examine this matter, in Raleigh, 
Schomburgk, Humboldt, and Condamine, and judge for them- 
selves. As for Hume's accusations, one passes them by as 
equally silly and shameless, only saying for the benefit of read- 
ers, that they have been refuted completely, by every one who 
has written since Hume's days : and to those who are induced to 
laugh at Raleigh for believing in Amazons, and "men whose 
heads do grow beneath their shoulders," we can only answer 
thus. 

About the Amazons, Raleigh told what he was told ; what the 
Spaniards who went before him, and Condamine who came after 
him, were told ; Humboldt thinks the story possibly founded on 
fact ; and we are ready to say, that after reviewing all that has 
been said thereon, haloes seem to us the simplest solution of the 
matter just to believe it true ; to believe that there was, about 
his time, or a little before, somewhere about the upper Orinoco, 



30 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

a warlike community of women, (Humboldt shows how likely 
such would be to spring up, where women flee from their male 
tyrants into the forests.) As for the fable which connected them 
with the lake Manoa, and the city of El Dorado, we can only 
answer, " If not true there and then, it is true elsewhere now ; " 
for the Amazonian guards of the King of Dahomey at this mo- 
ment, as all know, surpass in strangeness and in ferocity all that 
has been reported of the Orinocan viragos, and thus prove once 
more, that truth is stranger than fiction. 

Beside ; and here we stand stubborn, regardless of gibes and 
sneers : it is not yet proven that there was not in the sixteenth 
century, some rich and civilized kingdom like Peru or Mexico, 
in the interior of South America. Sir Richard Schomburgk has 
disproved the existence of Lake Parima : but it will take a long 
time, and more explorers than one, to prove that there are no 
ruins of ancient cities, such as Stephens stumbled on in Yucatan, 
still buried in the depths of the forests. Fifty years of ruin 
would suffice to wrap them in a leafy veil which would hide them 
from every one who did not literally run against them. Tribes 
would die out, or" change place, (as the Atures, and many other 
great nations have done in those parts,) and every traditional rec- 
ord of them perish gradually, (for it is only gradually and lately 
that it has perished ;) while if it be asked, What has become of 
the people themselves ? the answer is, that when any race (like 
most of the American races in the sixteenth century) is in a 
dying state, it hardly needs war to thin it down, and reduce the 
remnant to savagery. Greater nations than El Dorado was even 
supposed to be, have vanished ere now, and left not a trace be- 
hind ; and so may they. But enough of this. We leave the quarrel 
to that honest and patient warder of tourneys, Old Time, who will 
•surely do right at last, and go on to the dog-headed worthies with- 
out necks, and long hair hanging down behind, who, as a cacique 
told Raleigh, that " they had of late years slain many hundreds 
of his father's people," and in whom even Humboldt was not 
always allowed (he says) to disbelieve, (so much for Hume's scoff 
at Raleigh as a liar,) one old cacique boasting to him that he had 
seen them with his own eyes. Humboldt's explanation is, that 
the Caribs, being the cleverest and strongest Indians, are also the 
most imaginative, and therefore, being fallen children of Adam, 
the greatest liars, and that they invented both El Dorado and 
the dog-heads out of pure wickedness. Be it so. But all lies 
crystallize round some nucleus of truth ; and it really seems to 
us nothing very wonderful, if the story shoald be on the whole 
true, and that these worthies were in the habit.of dressing them- 
selves up, like foolish savages as they were, in the skins of the 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AXD HIS TIME. 31 

Aguara dog, with what not of stuffing, and tails, and so forth, in 
order to astonish the weak mind ? of the Caribs, just as the Red 
Indians dress up in their feasts as bears, wolves, and deer, with 
fox tails, false bustles of bison skin, and so forth. There are 
plenty of traces of such foolish attempts at playing " bogy " in 
the history of savages even of our own Teutonic forefathers ; 
and this we suspect to be the simple explanation of the whole 
mare's nest. As for Raleigh being a fool for believing it ; the 
reasons he gives for believing it are very rational ; the reasons 
Hume gives for calling him a fool rest merely on the story's 
being strange ; on which grounds one might disbelieve most mat- 
ters in heaven and earth, from one's own existence to what one 
sees in every drop of water under the microscope, yea, to the 
growth of every seed. Tne only sound proof that dog-headed 
men are impossible, is to be found in comparative anatomy, a 
science of which Hume knew no more than Raleigh, and which 
for one marvel it has destroyed, has revealed a hundred. TTe 
do not doubt, that if Raleigh had seen and described a kangaroo, 
especially its ail but miraculous process of gestation, Hume would 
have called that a lie also : but we will waste no more time 
in proving that no man is so credulous as the unbeliever — the 
man who has such mighty and world-embracing faith in himself, 
that he makes his own little brain the measure of the universe. 
Let the dead bury their dead. 

He sails for Guiana. The details of his voyage should be 
read at length. Everywhere they show the eye of a poet as 
well as of a. man of science. He sees enough to excite his hopes 
more wildly than ever ; he goes hundreds of miles up the Ori- 
noco in an open boat, suffering every misery : but keeping up 
the hearts of his men, who cry out, •' Let us go on. we care not 
how far." He makes friendship with the caciques, and enters 
into alliance with them on behalf of Queen Elizabeth against 
the Spaniards. Unable to . pass the falls of the Caroli, and the 
rainy season drawing on. he returns, beloved and honoured by 
all the Indians, boasting that, during the whole time he was there, 
no woman was the worse for any man of his crew. Altogether, 
we know few episodes of history, so noble, righteous, and merci- 
ful, as this Guiana voyage. But he has not forgotten the Span- 
iards. At Trinidad he attacks and destroys (at the entreaty 
of the oppressed Indians) the new town of San Jose, takes Ber- 
reo prisoner, and delivers from captivity five cacique-, whom 
Berreo "kept bound in one chain, " basting their bodies with 
burning foacou," (aj^old trick of the Conquistadores,) to make 
them discover thw gold. He tells them that he was ''the 



ne en v> 



servant of a qu^^rivho was the greatest cacique of the north, 



32 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

and a virgin ; who had more caciqui under her than there were 
trees on that island ; that she was an enemy of the Castellani 
(Spaniards) in behalf of their tyranny and oppression, and that 
she delivered all such nations about her as were by them oppress- 
ed, and having freed all the coast of the northern world from 
their servitude, had sent me to free them also, and withal to 
defend the country of Guiana from their invasion and conquest." 
After which perfectly true and rational speech, he subjoins, (as 
we think equally honestly and rationally,) " I showed them her 
Majesty's picture, which they so admired and honoured, as it had 
been easy to have brought them idolators thereof." 

This is one of the stock-charges against Raleigh, at which all 
biographers (except quiet, sensible Oldys, who, dull as he .is, is 
far more fair and rational than most of his successors) break into 
virtuous shrieks of "flattery," "meanness," "adulation," " cour- 
tiership," and so forth. Mr. Napier must say a witty thing for 
once, and is of opinion that the Indians would have admired far 
more the picture of a " red monkey." Sir Richard Schomburgk 
(unfortunately for the red monkey theory,) though he quite 
agrees that Raleigh's flattery was very shocking, says, that from 
what he knows (and no man knows more) of Indian taste, they 
would have far preferred to the portrait which Raleigh showed 
them (not Mr. Napier's red monkey, but) such a picture as that 
at Hampton Court, in which Elizabeth is represented in a fantas- 
tic dress. Raleigh, it seems, must be made out a rogue at all 
risks, though by the most opposite charges. Mr. Napier is an- 
swered, however, by Sir Richard, and Sir Richard is answered, 
we think, by the plain fact, that, of course, Raleigh's portrait was 
exactly such a one as Sir Richard says they would have admired : 
a picture probably in a tawdry frame, representing Queen Bess, 
just as queens were always painted then, bedizened with " brow- 
ches, pearls, and owches," satin and ruff, and probably with crown 
on head, and sceptre in hand, made up as likely as not expressly 
for the purpose for which it was used. In the name of all sim- 
plicity and honesty, we ask, why is Raleigh to be accused of say- 
ing that the Indians admired Queen Elizabeth's beauty, when he 
never even hints at it ? And why do all commentators deliber- 
ately forget the preceding paragraph, Raleigh's proclamation to 
the Indians, and the circumstances under which it was spoken ? 
The Indians are being murdered, ravished, sold for slaves, basted 
with burning fat, and grand white men come like avenging 
angels, and in one day sweep their tyrants out of the lanc^ restore 
them to liberty and life, and say to them, "A great Queen far 
across the seas has sent us to do this. Thousands of miles away 
she has heard of your misery, and taken pity on you ; and if 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 33 

you will be faithful to her she will love you, and deal justly with 
you, and protect you against these Spaniards who are devouring 
you as they have devoured all the Indians round you, and for a 
token of it — a sign that we tell you truth, and that there really is 
such a great Queen, who is the Indian's friend — here is the 
picture of her." What wonder if the poor idolatrous creatures 
had fallen down and worshipped the picture (just as millions do 
that of the Virgin Mary, without a thousandth part as sound and 
practical reason) as that of a divine, all-knowing, all-merciful 
deliverer ? As for its being the picture of a beautiful woman or 
not, they would never think of that. The fair complexion and 
golden hair would be a sign to them that she belonged to the 
mighty white people, even if there were no bedizenment of jewels 
and crowns over and above ; and that would be enough for them. 
When will biographers learn to do common justice to their 
fellow-men, by exerting now and then some small amount of 
dramatic imagination, just sufficient to put themselves for a mo- 
ment in the place of those to whom they write ? 

So ends his voyage : in which, he says, " from myself I have 
deserved no thanks, for I am returned a beggar and withered. 
But I might have bettered my poor estate if I had not only re- 
spected her Majesty's future honour and riches. It became not 
the former fortune in which I once lived to go journeys of pic- 
cory," (pillage ;) u and it had sorted ill with the offices of honour 
which, by her Majesty's grace, I hold this day in England, to 
run from cape to cape, and place to place, for the pillage of ordi- 
nary prizes." 

So speaks one whom it has been the fashion to consider as lit- 
tle better than a pirate, and that, too, in days when the noblest 
blood in England thought no shame (as indeed it was no shame) 
to enrich themselves with Spanish gold. But so it is throughout 
this man's life. If there be a nobler word than usual to be 
spoken, or a more wise word either, if there be a more chivalrous 
deed to be done, or a more prudent deed either, that word and 
that deed are pretty sure to be W 7 alter Raleigh's. 

But the blatant beast has been busy at home ; and in spite of 
Chapman's heroical verses, he meets with little but cold looks. 
Never mind. If the world will not help to do the deed, he will 
do it by himself; and no time must be lost, for the Spaniards on 
their part will lose none. So, after six months, the faithful Key- 
mis sails again, again helped by the Lord High Admiral and Sir 
Robert Cecil. It is a hard race for one private man against the 
whole power and wealth of Spain ; and the Spaniard has been 
beforehand with th&n, and reoccupied the country. They have 
fortified themselves at the mouth of the Caroli, so it is impossible 

2* 



34 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

to get to the gold mines ; they are enslaving the wretched In- 
dians, carrying off their women, intending to transplant some 
tribes, and to expel others, and arming cannibal tribes against 
the inhabitants. All is misery and rapine ; the scattered rem- 
nant comes asking piteously, why Raleigh does not come over 
to deliver them ? Have the Spaniards slain him, too ? Keymis 
comforts them as he best can ; hears of more gold mines, and 
gets back safe, a little to his own astonishment, for eight-and- 
twenty ships of war have been sent to Trinidad, to guard the 
entrance to El Dorado, not surely, as Keymis well says, " to keep 
us only from tobacco." A colony of five hundred persons is 
expected from Spain. The Spaniard is well aware of the rich- 
ness of the prize, says Keymis, who all through shows himself a 
worthy pupil of his master. A careful, observant man he seems 
to have been, trained by that great example to overlook no fact, 
even the smallest. He brings home lists of rivers, towns, ca- 
ciques, poison-herbs, words, what not ; he has fresh news of gold, 
spleen-stones, kidney-stones, and some fresh specimens : but be 
that as it may, he, " without going as far as his eyes can warrant, 
can promise Brazil-wood, honey, cotton, balsamum, and drugs, to 
defray charges." He would fain copy Raleigh's style, too, and, 
" whence his lamp had oil, borrow light also," " seasoning his un- 
savoury speech " with some of the " leaven of Raleigh's dis- 
course." Which, indeed, he does even to little pedantries and 
attempts at classicality, and after professing that "himself and 
the remnant of his few years, he hath bequeathed wholly to 
Raleanaj and his thoughts live only in that action " he rises into 
something like grandeur when he begins to speak of that ever- 
fertile subject, the Spanish cruelties to the Indians : " Doth not 
the cry of the poor succourless ascend unto the heavens ? Hath 
God forgotten to be gracious to the work of his own hands ? Or 
shall not his judgments in a day of visitation by the ministry of 
his chosen servant come upon these bloodthirsty butchers, like 
rain into a fleece of wool? " Poor Keymis ! To us he is by 
no means the least beautiful figure in this romance ; a faithful, 
diligent, loving man, unable, as the event proved, to do great 
deeds by himself, but inspired with a great idea by contact with 
a mightier spirit, to whom he clings through evil report and 
poverty and prison and the scaffold, careless of- self to the last, 
and ends tragically, "faithful unto death" in the most awful 
sense. 

But here remark two things : first, that Cecil believes in Ra- 
leigh's Guiana scheme ; next, that the occupation of Orinoco by 
the Spaniards, which Raleigh is accused of having concealed 
from James in 1617, has been, ever since 1595, matter of the 
most public notoriety. 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 35 

Raleigh has not been idle in the meanwhile. It has been found 
necessary after all to take the counsel which he gave in vain in 
1588, to burn the Spanish fleet in harbour ; and the heroes are 
gone down to Cadiz fight, and in one day of thunder-storm the 
Sevastopol of Spain. Here, as usual, we find Raleigh, though 
in an inferior command, leading the whole by virtue of superior 
wisdom. When the good Lord Admiral will needs be cautious, 
and land the soldiers first, it is Raleigh who persuades him to 
force his way into the harbour, to the joy of all captains. When 
hot-head Essex, casting his hat into the sea for joy, shouts Intra- 
mos, and will in at once, Raleigh's time for caution comes, and 
he persuades them to wait till the next morning, and arrange the 
order of attack. That, too, Raleigh has to do, and moreover to 
lead it ; and lead it he does. Under the forts are seventeen 
galleys ; the channel is " scoured " with cannon : but on holds 
Raleigh's Warspite, far ahead of the rest, through the thickest 
of the fire, answering forts and galleys " with a blow of the 
trumpet to each piece, disdaining to shoot at those esteemed 
dreadful monsters." For there is a nobler enemy ahead. Right 
in front lie the galleons ; and among them the Philip and the 
Andrew, two who boarded the Revenge. This day there shall 
be a reckoning for the blood of his old friend ; he is " resolved 
to be revenged for the Revenge, Sir Richard Grenvile's fatal 
ship, or second her with his own life ; " and well he keeps his 
vow. Three hours pass of desperate valour, during which, so 
narrow is the passage, only seven English ships, thrusting past 
each other, all but quarrelling in their noble rivalry, engage the 
whole Spanish fleet of fifty-seven sail, and destroy it utterly. 
The Philip and Thomas burn themselves despairing. The Eng- 
lish boats save the Andrew and Matthew. One passes over the 
hideous record. " If any man," says Raleigh, " had a desire to 
see hell itself, it was there most lively figured." Keymis's prayer 
is answered in part, even while he writes it ; and the cry of the 
Indians has not ascended in vain before the throne t)f God ! 

The soldiers are landed ; the city stormed and sacked, not 
without mercies and courtesies, though, to women and unarmed 
folk, which win the hearts of the vanquished, and live till this 
day in well-known ballads. The Flemings begin a " merciless 
slaughter." Raleigh and the Lord Admiral beat them off. Ra- 
leigh is carried on shore for an hour with a splinter wound in 
the leg, which lames him for life : but returns on board in an 
hour in agony ; for there is no admiral left to order the fleet, 
and all are run headlong to the sack. In vain he attempts to 
get together sailors the following morning, and attack the Indian 
fleet in Porto Real Roads ; within twenty -four hours it is burnt 



36 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

by the Spaniards themselves ; and all Raleigh wins is no booty, 
a lame leg, and the honour of having been the real author of a 
victory even more glorious than that of 1588. 

So he returns, having written to Cecil the highest praises of 
Essex, whom he treats with all courtesy and fairness ; which 
those who will may call cunning : we have as good a right to 
say that he was returning good for evil. There were noble 
qualities in Essex. All the world gave him credit for them, and 
far more than he deserved ; why should not Raleigh have been 
just to him, even have conceived, like the rest of the world, high 
hopes of him, till he himself destroyed these hopes ? Eor now 
storms are rising fast. On their return Cecil is in power. He 
has been made Secretary of State instead of Bodley, Essex's 
pet, and the spoilt child begins to sulk. On which matter, we 
are sorry to say, Mr. Tytler and others talk much unwisdom, 
about Essex's being too u open and generous, &c. for a courtier," 
and " presuming on his mistress' passion for him ; " and represent 
Elizabeth as desiring to be thought beautiful, and " affecting at 
sixty, the sighs, loves, tears, and tastes, of a girl of sixteen," — 
and so forth. It is really time to get rid of some of this fulsome 
talk, culled from such triflers as Osborne, if not from the darker 
and fouler sources of Parsons and the Jesuit slanderers, which 
we meet with a flat denial. There is simply no proof. She in 
love with Essex or Cecil ? Yes, as a mother with a son. Were 
they not the children of her dearest and most faithful servants, 
men who had lived heroic lives for her sake ? What wonder if 
she fancied that she saw the fathers in the sons ? They had 
been trained under her eye. What wonder if she fancied that 
they could work as their fathers worked before them? And 
what shame if her childless heart yearned over them with un- 
speakable affection, and longed in her old age to lay her hands 
upon the shoulders of those two young men, and say to Eng- 
land, " Behold the children which God, and not the flesh, has 
given me ? " * Most strange it is, too, that women, who ought at 
least to know a woman's heart, have been especially forward in 
publishing these stupid scandals, and sullying their pages by re- 
tailing prurient slander against such a one as Queen Elizabeth. 

But to return. Raleigh attaches himself to Cecil ; and he 
has good reason. Cecil is the cleverest man in England, saving 
himself. He has trusted and helped him, too, in two Guiana 
voyages ; so the connection is one of gratitude as well as pru- 
dence. We know not whether he helped him in the third Guiana 
voyage in the same year, under Captain Berry, (a north Devon 
man, from Grenvile's country,) who found a mighty folk, who 
were " something pleasant, having drunk much that day," and 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 37 

carried bows with golden handles ; but failed in finding the Lake 
Parima, and so came home. 

Raleigh's first use of his friendship with Cecil, is to reconcile 
him, to the astonishment of the world, with Essex, alleging how 
much good may grow by it ; for now, " the Queen's continual 
unquietness will grow to contentment." That, too, those who 
will may call policy. We have as good a right to call it the act 
of a wise and faithful subject, and to say, " Blessed are the peace- 
makers, for they shall be called the children of God." He has 
his reward for it, in full restoration to the Queen's favour ; he 
deserves it. He proves himself once more worthy of power, 
and it is given to him. Then there is to be a second great ex- 
pedition ; but this time its aim is the Azores. Philip, only mad- 
dened by the loss at Cadiz, is preparing a third armament for 
the invasion of England and Ireland, and it is said to lie at the 
islands to protect the Indian fleet. Raleigh has the victualling 
of the land-forfces, and like every thing else he takes in hand, 
" it is very well done." Lord Howard declines the chief com- 
mand, and it is given to Essex. Raleigh is to be rear-admiral. 

By the time they reach the Azores, Essex has got up a foolish 
quarrel against Raleigh for disrespect in having staid behind to 
bring up some stragglers. But when no armada is to be found 
at the Azores, Essex has after all to ask Raleigh what he shall 
do next. Conquer the Azores, says Raleigh, and the thing is 
agreed on. Raleigh and Essex are to attack Fayal. Essex 
sails away before Raleigh has watered. Raleigh follows as fast 
as he can, and at Fayai finds no Essex. He must water there, 
then and at once. His own veterans want him to attack forth- 
with, for the Spaniards are fortifying fast ; but he will wait for 
Essex. Still no Essex comes. Raleigh attempts to water, is 
defied, finds himself "in for it," and takes the island out of 
hand in the most masterly fashion, to the infuriation of Essex. 
Good Lord Howard patches up the matter, and the hot-headed 
coxcomb is once more pacified. They go on to Graciosa, where 
Essex's weakness of will again comes out, and he does not take 
the island. Three rich caracks, however, are picked up. 
" Though we shall be little the better for them," says Raleigh 
privately to Sir Arthur Gorges, his faithful captain, u yet I am 
heartily glad for our General's sake ; because they will in great 
measure give content to her Majesty, so that there may be no re- 
pining against this poor Lord for the expense of the voyage." 

Raleigh begins to see that Essex is only to be pitied that the 
voyage is not over likely to end well ; but he takes it, in spite of 
ill-usage, as a kind-hearted man should. Again Essex makes a 
fool of himself. They are to steer one way in order to interrupt 



38 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

the Plate-fleet. Essex having agreed to the course pointed out, 
alters his course on a fancy ; then alters it a second time, though 
the hapless Monson, with the whole Plate-fleet in sight, is hang- 
ing out lights, firing guns, and shrieking vainly for the General, 
who is gone on a new course, in which he might have caught the 
fleet after all, in spite of his two mistakes, but that he chooses to 
go a round-about way instead of a short one ; and away goes 
the whole fleet safe, save one carack, which runs itself on shore 
and burns, and the game is played out, and lost. 

All want Essex to go home as the season is getting late : but 
the wilful and weak man will linger still, and while he is hover- 
ing to the south, Philip's armament has sailed from the Groyne, 
on the undefended shores of England, and only God's hand saves 
us from the effects of Essex's folly. A third time the armadas 
of Spain are overwhelmed by the avenging tempests, and Essex 
returns to disgrace, having proved himself at once intemperate 
and incapable. Even in coming home there is confusion, and 
Essex is all but lost on the Bishop and Clerks, by Scilly, in spite 
of the warnings of Raleigh's sailing-master " Old Broadbent," 
who is so exasperated at the general stupidity that he wants 
Raleigh to leave Essex and his squadron to get out of their own 
scrape as they can. 

Essex goes off to salt at Wanstead ; but Yere excuses him, 
and in a few days he comes back, and will needs fight good Lord 
Howard for being made Earl of Nottingham for his services 
against the Armada, and at Cadiz. Balked of this, he begins 
laying the blame of the failure at the Azores on Raleigh. Let 
the spoilt naughty boy take care ; even that " admirable temper " 
for which Raleigh is famed, may be worn out at last. 

These years are Raleigh's noon — stormy enough at best, yet 
brilliant. There is a pomp about him, outward and inward, which 
is terrible to others, dangerous to himself. One has gorgeous 
glimpses of that grand Durham House of his, with its carvings 
and its antique marbles, armorial escutcheons, " beds with green 
silk hangings and legs like dolphins, overlaid with gold ; " and the 
man himself, tall, beautiful, and graceful, perfect alike in body 
and in mind, walking to and fro, his beautiful wife upon his arm, 
his noble boy beside his knee, in his " white satin doublet em- 
broidered with pearls, and a great chain of pearls about his neck," 
lording it among the lords with " an awfulness and ascendency 
above other mortals," for which men say that " his nasve is, that 
he is damnable proud ; " and no wonder. The reduced squire's 
younger son has gone forth to conquer the world ; and he fancies, 
poor fool, that he has conquered it, just as it really has conquered 
him; and he will stand now on his blood and his pedigree, (no 



SIR WALTEB BALEIGH AND fflS TIME. 39 

bad one either.) and all the more stiffly because puppies like Lord 
Oxford, who instead of making their fortunes have squandered 
them, call him "jack and upstart,''" and make impertinent faces 
while the queen is playing the virginals, about " how when jacks 
go up, heads go down." Proud ? Xo wonder if the man be 
proud. "Is not this great Babylon, which I have built? " And 
yet all the while he has the most affecting consciousness that all 
this is not God's will, but the will of the flesh ; that the house of 
fame is not the house of God ; that its floor is not the rock of 
ages, but the sea of glass mingled with fire, which may crack be- 
neath him any moment, and let the nether flame burst up. He 
knows that he is living in a splendid lie ; that he is not what God 
meant him to be. He longs to flee away and be at peace. It is 
to this period, not to his death-hour, that " The Lie " belongs ; * 
saddest of poems, with its melodious contempt and life-weariness. 
All is a lie — court, church, statesmen, courtiers, wit and science, 
town and country, all are shams ; the days are evil ; the canker 
is at the root of all things ; the old heroes are dying one by one ; 
the Elizabethan age is rotting down, as all human things do, and 
nothing is left but to bewail with Spenser "The Kuins of Time;" 
the glory and virtue which have been — the greater glory and vir- 
tue which might be even now, if men would but arise and repent, 
and work righteousness, as their fathers did before them. But 
no. Even to such a world as this he will cling, and flaunt it 
about as captain of the guard in the Queen's progresses and 
ma-ques and pageants, with sword-belt studded with diamonds 
and rubies, or at tournaments, in armour of solid silver, and a 
gallant train with orange-tawny feathers, provoking puppy Essex 
to bring in a far larger train in the same colours, and swallow up 
Eaieigh's pomp in his own, so achieving that famous " feather- 
triumph" by which he gains little but bad blood and a good jest. 
For Essex is no better tiiter than he is general ; and having " run 
very ill " in his orange-tawny, comes next day in green, and runs 
still worse, and yet is seen to be the same cavalier ; whereon a 
spectator shrewdly observes, that he changed his colours " that it 
may be reported that there was one in green who ran worse than 
he in orange-tawny." But enough of these toys, while God's 
handwriting is upon the wall above all heads. 

Ealeigh knows that the handwriting is there. The spirit 
which drove him forth to Virginia and Guiana is fallen asleep : 
but he longs for Sherborne and quiet country life, and escapes 
thither during Essex's imprisonment, taking Cecil's son with him, 
and writes as only he can write, about the shepherd's peaceful 

* It is to be found in a MS. of 1596. 



40 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

joys, contrasted with " courts " and " masques " and " proud 
towers." — 

" Here are no false entrapping baits 
Too hasty for too hasty fates, 
Unless it be 
The fond credulity 
Of silly fish, that worldling who still look 
Upon the bait, but never on the hook; 
Nor envy, unless among 
The birds, for prize of their sweet song. 

" Go ! let the diving negro seek 
For pearls hid in some forlorn creek, 
We all pearls scorn, 
Save w r hat the dewy morn 
Congeals upon some little spire of grass, 
Which careless shepherds beat down as they pass ; 
And gold ne'er here appears 
Save w r hat the yellow Ceres bears." 

Tragic enough are the after scenes of Raleigh's life ; but most 
tragic of all are these scenes of vainglory, in which he sees the 
better part, and yet chooses the worse, and pours out his self- 
discontent in song which proves the fount of delicacy and beauty 
which lies pure and bright beneath the gaudy artificial crust. 
What might not this man have been! And he knows that too. 
The stately rooms of Durham House pall on him, and he delights 
to hide up in his little study among his books and his chemical 
experiments, and smoke his silver pipe, and look out on the 
clear Thames and the green Surrey hills, and dream about 
Guiana and the Tropics ; or to sit in the society of antiquaries 
with Selden and Cotton, Camden and Stow ; or in his own 
Mermaid club, with Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont, and at 
last with Shakspeare's self, to hear and utter « 

" Words that have been 
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame, 
As if that every one from whom they came 
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest." * 

Any thing to forget the handwriting on the wall, which will not 
be forgotten. 

But he will do all the good which he can meanwhile, neverthe- 
less. He will serve God and Mammon. So complete a man will 
surely be able to do both. Unfortunately the thing is impossible, 
as he discovers too late ; but he certainly goes as near success in 
the attempt as ever man did. Everywhere we find him doing 
justly, and loving mercy. Wherever this man steps he leaves 
his footprint ineffaceably in deeds of benevolence. For one year 

* Beaumont on the Mermaid Club; Letter to B, Jonson. 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 41 

only, it seems, he is governor of Jersey : yet to this day, it is said, 
the islanders honour his name, only second to that of Duke Rollo, 
as their great benefactor, the founder of their Newfoundland trade. 
In the west country he is " as a king," " with ears and mouth 
always open to hear and deliver their grievances, feet and hands 
ready to go and work their redress." The tin merchants have 
become usurers " of fifty in the hundred." Raleigh works till he 
has put down their " abominable and cut-throat dealing." There 
is a burdensome west-country tax on curing fish ; Raleigh works 
till it is revoked. In parliament he is busy with liberal measures, 
always before his generation. He puts down a foolish act for 
compulsory sowing of hemp, in a speech on the freedom of 
labour, worthy of the nineteenth century. He argues against 
raising the subsidy from the three pound men — " Call you this, 
Mr. Francis Bacon, par jugum when a poor man pays as much 
as a rich ? " He is equally rational and spirited against the ex- 
portation of ordnance to the enemy ; and when the question of 
abolishing monopolies is mooted he has his wise word. He too 
is a monopolist of tin, as Lord Warden of the Stannaries. But 
he has so wrought as to bring good out of evil ; for before the 
granting of his patent, let the price of tin be never so high, the 
poor workman never had but two shillings a week ; yet now, so has 
he extended and organized the tin-works, that any man who will 
can find work, and, be tin at what price soever, have four shillings 

a week truly paid " Yet if all others may be repealed, 

I will give my consent as freely to the cancelling of this, as any 
member of this house." Most of the monopolies were repealed : 
but we do not find that Raleigh's was among them. Why should 
it be if its issue was more tin, and full work, and double wages ? 
In all things this "man approves himself faithful in his generation. 
His sins are not against man, but against God ; such as the 
world thinks no sins ; and hates them, not from morality, but 
from envy. 

In the meanwhile, the evil which, so Spenser had prophesied, 
only waited Raleigh's death, breaks out in his absence, and 
Ireland is all aflame with Tyrone's rebellion. Raleigh is sent 
for. He will not accept the post of Lord Deputy, and go to put 
it clown. Perhaps he does not expect fair play as long as Essex 
is at home. Perhaps he knows too much of the common weal, 
or rather common woe, and thinks that what is crooked cannot 
be made straight. Perhaps he is afraid to lose by absence his 
ground at court. Would that he had gone, for Ireland's sake 
and his own. However, it must not be. Ormoncl is recalled and 
Knolles shall be sent ; but Essex will have none but Sir George 
Carew ; whom, iNaunton says, he hates, and wishes to oust from 



42 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

court. He and Elizabeth argue it out. He turns his back on 
her, and she gives him (or does not give him, for one has found 
so many of these racy anecdotes vanish on inspection into simple 
wind, that one believes none of them) a box on the ear ; which 
if she did, she did the most wise, just, and practical thing which 
she could do with such a puppy. He clasps his hand (or does 
not) to his sword — " He would not have taken it from Henry 
the VIII.," and is turned out forthwith. In vain Egerton, the ' 
lord keeper, tries to bring him to reason. He storms insanely. 
Every one on earth is wrong but he ; every one is conspiring 
against him ; he talks of " Solomon's fool " too. Had he read 
the Proverbs a little more closely, he might have left the said 
fool alone, as being a too painfully exact likeness of himself. It 
ends by his being worsted, and Raleigh rising higher than ever. 
We never could see why Raleigh should be represented as hence- 
forth becoming Essex's " avowed enemy," save on the ground 
that all good men are and ought to be the enemies of bad men, 
when they see them about to do harm, and to ruin the country. 
Essex is one of the many persons upon whom this age has lav- 
ished a quantity of maudlin sentimentality, which suits oddly 
enough with its professions of impartiality. But there is an im- 
partiality which ends in utter injustice, which, by saying care- 
lessly to every quarrel, " Both are right, and both are wrong," 
leaves only the impression that all men are wrong, and ends by 
being unjust to every one. So has Elizabeth and Essex's quarrel 
been treated. There was some evil in Essex ; therefore Eliza- 
beth was a fool for liking him. There was some good in Essex ; 
therefore Elizabeth was cruel in punishing him. This is the 
sort of slipshod dilemma by which Elizabeth is proved to be 
wrong, even while Essex is confessed to be wrong too ; while the 
patent facts of the case are, that Elizabeth bore with him as long 
as she could, and a great deal longer than any one else could. 
Why Raleigh should be accused of helping to send Essex into 
Ireland, we do not know. Camden confesses (at the same time 
that he gives a hint of the kind) that Essex w r ould let no one go 
but himself. And if this was his humour, one can hardly wonder 
at Cecil and Raleigh, as w r ell as Elizabeth, bidding the man 
begone and try his hand at government, and be filled with the 
fruit of his own devices. He goes ; does nothing ; or rather 
worse than nothing ; for in addition to the notorious ill-manage- 
ment of the whole matter, w T e may fairly say that he killed 
Elizabeth. She never held up her head again after Tyrone's 
rebellion. Elizabeth still clings to him, changing her mind about 
him every hour, and at last writes him such a letter as he de- 
serves. He has had power, money, men, such as no one ever 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 43 

bad before, wby has be clone nothing but bring England to 
shame ? He comes home frantically (the story of his bursting 
into the dressing-room rests on no good authority) with a party 
of friends at his heels, leaving Ireland to take care of itself. 
Whatever entertainment he met with from the fond old woman, 
he met with the coldness which he deserved from Raleigh and 
Cecil. Who can wonder ? What had he done to deserve 
aught else ? But he all but conquers ; and Raleigh takes to his 
bed in consequence, sick of the whole matter ; as one would have 
been inclined to do one's self. He is examined and arraigned ; 
writes a maudlin letter to Elizabeth, of which Mr. Tytler says, 
that it " says little for the heart which could resist it ; " another 
instance of the strange self-contradictions into which his brains 
will run. In one page, forsooth, Elizabeth is a fool for listening 
to these pathetical " love letters ; " in the next page she is hard- 
hearted for not listening to them. Poor thing ! Do what she 
would she found it hard enough to please all parties while alive ; 
must she be condemned over and above in ceternum to be wrong 
whatsoever she does ? Why is she not to have the benefit of the 
plain, straightforward interpretation which would be allowed to 
any other human being, namely, that she approved of such fine 
talk, as long as it was proved to be sincere by fine deeds ; but 
that when these were wanting, the fine talk became hollow, ful- 
some, a fresh cause of anger and disgust ? Yet still she weeps 
over him when he falls sick, as any mother would ; and would 
visit him if she could with honour. But a "'malignant influence 
counteracts every disposition to relent." No doubt, a man's own 
folly, passion, and insolence, has generally a very malignant in- 
fluence on his fortunes, and he may consider himself a very happy 
man if all that befalls to him thereby is what befell Essex, dep- 
rivation of his offices, and imprisonment in his own house. He 
is forgiven after all ; but the spoilt child refuses his bread and 
butter without sugar. What is the pardon to him without a re- 
newal of his license of sweet wines ? Because he is not to have 
that, the Queen's " conditions are as crooked as her carcase.'' 
Flesh and blood can stand no more, and ought to stand no more. 
After all that Elizabeth has been to him, that speech is the 
speech of a brutal and ungrateful nature. And such he shows 
himself to be in the hour of trial. What if the patent for sweet 
wines is refused him ? Such gifts were meant as the reward of 
merit ; and what merit has he to show ? He never thinks of 
that. Blind with fury he begins to intrigue with James, and 
slanders to him, under colour of helping his succession, all whom 
he fancies opposed to him. What is worse, he intrigues with 
Tyrone about bringing over an army of Irish Papists to help 



44 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

him against the Queen, and this at the very time that his sole 
claim to popularity rests on his being the leader of the Puritans. 
A man must have been very far gone, either in baseness, or blind 
fury, who represents Raleigh to James as dangerous to the com- 
monweal, on account of his great power in the west of England 
and Jersey, " places fit for the Spaniard to land in." Cobham, 
as warden of the Cinque ports, is included in his slander ; and 
both he and Raleigh will hear of it again. 

Some make much of a letter, supposed to be written about this 
time by Raleigh to Cecil, bidding Cecil keep down Essex, even 
crush him, now that he is once down. We do not happen to 
think the letter to be Raleigh's. His initals are subscribed to it ; 
but not his name ; and the style is not like his. But as for see- 
ing " unforgiveness and revenge in it," whose soever it may be, 
we hold and say there is not a word which can bear such a con- 
struction. It is a dark letter : but about a dark matter, and a 
dark man. It is a worldly and expecliential letter, appealing to 
low motives in Cecil, though for a right end ; such a letter, in 
short, as statesmen are wont to write now-a-days. If Raleigh 
wrote it, God punished him for doing so speedily enough. He 
does not punish statesmen now-a-days for such letters ; perhaps 
because He does not love them as well as Raleigh. But as for 
the letter itself. Essex is called a " tyrant," because he had 
shown himself one. The Queen is to " hold Both well," because 
" while she hath him, he will even be the canker of her estate 
and safety," and the writer has " seen the last of her good days, 
and of ours, after his liberty." On which accounts, Cecil is not 
to be deterred from doing w T hat is right and necessary "by any 
fear of after-revenges," and " conjectures from causes remote," 
as many a stronger instance (given) will prove, but " look to the 
present," and so u do wisely." There is no real cause for Cecil's 
fear. If the man who has now lost a power which he ought 
never to have had, be now kept down, neither he nor his son 
will ever be able to harm the man who has kept him at his just 
level. What " revenge, selfishness, and craft," there can be in 
all this, it is difficult to see, as difficult as to see why Essex is to 
be talked of as " unfortunate," and the blame of his frightful end 
thrown on every one but himself : or why Mr. Tytler finds it 
unnecessary to pursue his "well-known story further," after 
having proved Raleigh to be all on a sudden turned into a fiend : 
unless, indeed, it was inconvenient to bring before the reader's 
mind the curious and now forgotten fact, that Essex's end was 
brought on bj^ his having chosen one Sunday morning for break- 
ing out into open rebellion, for the purpose of seizing the city of 
London and the Queen's person, and compelling her to make 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 45 

him lord and master of the British isles ; in which attempt he 
and his fought with the civil and military authorities, till artillery 
had to be brought up, and many lives were lost. Such little 
escapades maybe pardonable enough in "noble and unfortunate" 
earls : but our readers will perhaps agree that if they chose to 
try a similar experiment, they could not complain if they found 
themselves shortly after in company with Mr. Mitchell at Spike 
Island, or Mr. Oxford in Bedlam. But those were days in which 
such Sabbath amusements on the part of one of the most impor- 
tant and powerful personages of the realm could not be passed 
over so lightly, especially when accompanied by severe loss of 
life ; and as there existed in England certain statutes concerning 
rebellion and high treason, which must needs have been framed 
for some purpose or other, the authorities of England may be ex- 
cused for fancying that they bore some reference to such acts as 
that which the noble and unfortunate earl had just committed, as 
wantonly, selfishly, and needlessly, it seems to us, as ever did 
man on earth. 

We may seem to jest too much upon so solemn a matter as 
the life of a human being : but if we are not to touch the popu- 
lar talk about Essex in this tone, we can only touch it in a far 
sterner one ; and if ridicule is forbidden, express disgust in- 
stead. 

We have entered into this matter of Essex somewhat at length, 
because on it is founded one of the mean slanders from which 
Raleigh never completely recovered. The very mob who, after 
Raleigh's death, made him a Protestant martyr, (as, indeed he 
was,) soon looked upon Essex in the same light, hated Raleigh 
as the cause of his death, and accused him of glutting his eyes 
with Essex's misery, puffing tobacco out of a window, and what 
not, — all mere inventions, as Raleigh declared upon the scaffold. 
He was there in his office, as captain of the guard, and could do 
no less than be there. Essex, it is said, asked for Raleigh just 
before he died : but Raleigh had withdrawn, the mob murmur- 
ing. What had Essex to say to him ? Was it, asks Oldys, 
shrewdly enough, to ask him pardon for the wicked slanders 
which he had been pouring into James's credulous and cowardly 
ears ? We will hope so, and leave poor Essex to God and the 
mercy of God, asserting once more, that no man ever brought 
ruin and cfeath more thoroughly on himself by his own act, need- 
ing no imaginary help downwards from Raleigh, Cecil, or other 
human beins:. 

And now begins the fourth act of tliis # strange tragedy. Queen 
Elizabeth dies ; and dies of grief. It has been the fashion to 
attribute to her, we know not what, remorse for Essex's death ; 



46 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

and the foolish and false tale about Lady Nottingham and the 
ring has been accepted as history. The fact seems to be that 
she never really held up her head after Burleigh's death. She 
could not speak of him without tears ; forbade his name to be 
mentioned in the Council. No wonder ; never had mistress a 
better servant. For nearly half a century have these two noble 
souls loved each other, trusted each other, worked with each 
other ; and God's blessing has been on their deeds ; and now the 
faithful God-fearing man is gone to his reward ; and she is grow- 
ing old, and knows that the ancient fire is dying out in her ; and 
who will be to her what he was ? Buckhurst is a good man, and 
one of her old pupils ; and she makes him Lord Treasurer in 
Raleigh's place : but beyond that, all is dark. " I am a miser- 
able forlorn woman, there is none about me that I can trust ! " 
She sees through false Cecil ; through false Henry Howard. 
Essex has proved himself worthless, and pays the penalty of his 
sins. Men are growing worse than their fathers. Spanish gold 
is bringing in luxury and sin. The ten last years of her reign 
are years of decadence, profligacy, falsehood ; and she cannot 
but see it. Tyrone's rebellion is the last drop which fills the 
cup. After Ri'ty years of war, after a drain of money all but 
fabulous, expended on keeping Ireland quiet, the volcano bursts 
forth again just as it seemed extinguished, more fiercely than 
ever, and the whole work has to be done over again, when there 
is neither time, nor a man to do it. And ahead, what hope is 
there for England ? Who will be her successor ? She knows 
in her heart that it will be James : but she cannot bring Herself 
to name him. To bequeathe the fruit of all her labours to a 
tyrant, a liar, and a coward ! (for she knows the man but too 
well.) It is too hideous to be faced. This is the end, then ? 
" Oh that I were a miike maide, with a paile upon mine arm ! " 
But it cannot be. It never could have been ; and she must en- 
dure to the end. 

" Therefore I hated life ; yea, I hated all my labour which I 
had taken under the sun ; because I should leave it to the man 
that shall be after me. And who knows whether he shall be a 
wise man or a fool ? yet shall he have rule over all my labour 
wherein I have showed myself wise, in wisdom, and knowledge, 
and equity. . . . Vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit ! " 
And so, with a whole book of Ecclesiastes written on that mighty 
heart, the old lioness coils herself up in her lair, refuses food, 
and dies. We know few passages in the world's history so 
tragic as that death. 

Why did she not trust Raleigh ? First, because Raleigh (as 
we have seen) was not the sort of man whom she needed. He 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 47 

was not the steadfast single-eyed man of business ; but the many- 
sided genius. Beside, he was the ringleader of the war-party. 
And she, like Burleigh before his death, was tired of the war; 
saw that it was demoralizing England ; was anxious for peace. 
Raleigh would not see that. It was to him a divine mission 
which must be fulfilled at all risks. As long as the Spaniards 
were opposing the Indians, conquering America, there must be 
no peace. Both were right from their own point of view. God 
ordered the matter from a third point of view ; for His wrath 
was gone out against this people. 

Beside, we know that Essex, and after him Cecil and Henry 
Howard, have been slandering Raleigh basely to James. Can 
we doubt that the same poison had been poured into Elizabeth's 
ears ? She might distrust Cecil too much to act upon what he 
said of Raleigh ; and yet distrust Raleigh too much *to put the 
kingdom into his hands. However, she is gone now, and a new 
king has arisen, who knoweth not Joseph. 

James comes down to take possession. Insolence, luxury, and 
lawlessness mark his first steps on his going amid the adulations 
of a fallen people ; he hangs a poor wretch without trial ; wastes 
his time in hunting by the way ; — a bad and base man, whose 
only redeeming point (and it is a great one) is his fondness for 
little children. But that will not make a king. The wise elders 
take counsel together. Raleigh and good Judge Fortescue are 
for requiring conditions from the new comer, and constitutional 
liberty makes its last stand among the men of Devon, the old 
county of warriors, discoverers, and statesmen, of which Queen 
Bess had said, that the men of Devon were her right hand. But 
in vain ; James has his way ; Cecil and Henry Howard are 
willing enough to give it him. Let their memory be accursed ; 
for never did two bad men more deliberately betray the freedom 
of their country. So down comes Rehoboam, taking counsel with 
the young men, and makes answer to England, " My father chas- 
tised you with whips ; but I will chastise you with scorpions." 
He takes a base pleasure, shocking to the French ambassador, 
in sneering at the memory of Queen Elizabeth ; a perverse 
delight in honouring every rascal whom she had punished. 
Tyrone must come to England to be received into favour, mad- 
dening the soul of honest Sir John Harrington. Essex is chris- 
tened " my martyr," apparently for having plotted treason against 
Elizabeth with Tyrone. Raleigh is received with a pun — " By 
my soul, I have heard rawly of thee, mon ; " and when the great 
nobles and gentlemen come to Court with their retinues, James 
tries to hide his dread of them in an insult, pooh poohs their 
splendour, and says, " he doubts not that he should have been 



48 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

able to win England for himself, had they kept him out." Ral- 
eigh answers boldly, " Would God that had been put to the 
trial." " Why ? " u Because then you would have known your 
friends from your foes." " A reason " (says old Aubrey) " never 
forgotten or forgiven." Aubrey is no great authority ; but the 
speech smacks so of Raleigh's offhand daring, that one cannot 
but believe it, as one does also the other story of his having 
advised the lords to keep out James and erect a republic. Not 
that he could have been silly enough to propose such a thing 
seriously at that moment ; but that he most likely, in his offhand 
way, may have said, u Well, if we are to have this man in with- 
out conditions, better a republic at once." Which, if he did say, 
he said what the next forty years proved to be strictly true. 
However, he will go on his own way as best he can. If James 
will give liim a loan, he and the rest of the old heroes will join, 
fit out a fleet against Spain, and crush her, now that she is tot- 
tering and impoverished, once and for ever. Alas ! James has 
no stomach for fighting, cannot abide the sight of a drawn sword — 
would not provoke Spain for the world — why, they might send 
Jesuits and assassinate him ; and as for the money, he wants 
that for very different purposes. So the answer which he makes 
to Raleigh's proposal of war against Spain, is to send him to the 
Tower, and sentence him to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, on 
a charge of plotting with Spain. 

Having read, we believe, nearly all that has been written on 
the subject of this dark " Cobham plot," we find but one thing 
come brightly out of the infinite" confusion and mystery, which 
will never be cleared up till the clay of judgment, and that is, 
Raleigh's innocence. He, and all England, and the very man 
who condemned him, knew that he was innocent. Every biog- 
rapher is forced to confess this, more or less, in spite of all efforts 
to be what is called "impartial." So we shall waste no words 
upon the matter, only observing, that whereas Raleigh is said to 
have slandered Cecil to James, in the same way that Cecil had 
slandered him, one passage of this Cobham plot disproves utterly 
such a story, which, after all, rests (as far as we know) only on 
hearsay, being " spoken of in a manuscript written by one Buck, 
secretary to Chancellor Egerton." For in writing to his own 
wife, in the expectation of immediate death, Raleigh speaks of 
Cecil in a very different tone, as one in whom he trusted most, 
and who has left him in the hour of need. We ask the reader 
to peruse that letter, and say whether any man would write thus, 
with death and judgment before his face, of one whom he knew 
that he had betrayed ; or, indeed, of one who he knew had betrayed 
him. We see no reason to doubt that Raleigh kept good faith 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME, 49 

with Cecil, and that he was ignorant, till after his trial, that Cecil 
was the manager of the whole plot against him, and as accom- 
plished a villain as one meets with in history. 

We do not care to enter into the tracasseries of this Cobham 
plot. Every one knows them ; no one can unravel them. To 
us the moral and spiritual significance of the fact is more inter- 
esting than all questions as to Cobham's lies, Brooke's lies, Arem- 
berg's lies, Coke's lies, James's lies : — Let the dead bury their 
dead. It is the broad aspect of the thing which is so wonderful 
to us ; to see how 

" The eagle, towering in his pride of place, 
Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed." 

This is the man who six months ago, perhaps, thought that he 
and Cecil were to rule England together, while all else were the 
puppets whose wires they pulled. " The Lord hath taken him 
up, and dashed him down : " and by such means, too, and on 
such a charge ! Betraying his country to Spain ! Absurd — 
incredible. He would laugh it to scorn ; but it is bitter earnest. 
There is no escape. True or false, he sees that his enemies will 
have his head. It is maddening ; a horrible nightmare. He 
cannot bear it ; he cannot face (so he writes to that beloved wife) 
the scorn, the taunts, the loss of honour, the cruel words of law- - 
yers. He stabs himself. Read that letter of his, written after 
the mad blow had been struck ; it is sublime from intensity of 
agony. The way in which the chastisement was taken proves 
how utterly it was needed, ere that proud, success-swollen, world- 
entangled heart could be brought right with Gocl. 

And it is brought right. The wound is not mortal. He 
comes slowly to a better mind, and takes his doom like a man. 
That first farewell to his wife was written out of hell. The 
second rather out of heaven. Read it, too, and compare ; and 
then see how the Lord has been working upon this great soul : 
infinite sadness, infinite tenderness and patience, and trust in 
God for himself and his poor wife : " God is my witness, it was 
for you and yours that I desired life ; but it is true that I dis- 
dain myself for begging it. For know, dear wife, that your son 
is the son of a true man, and one who, in his own respect, 
despiseth death and all his ugly and misshapen forms. 
The everlasting, powerful, infinite, and omnipotent God, who is 
goodness itself, the true life and light, keep thee and thine, have 
mercy upon me, and teach me to forgive my persecutors and 
accusers, and send us to meet in his glorious kingdom." 

Is it come to this, then ? Is he fit to die, at last ? Then he 
3 



50 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

is fit to live ; and live he shall. The tyrants have not the heart 
to carry out their own crime, and Raleigh shall be respited. 

But not pardoned. No more return for him into that sinful 
world, where he flaunted on the edge of the precipice, and 
dropped heedless over it. God will hide him in the secret place 
of his presence, and keep him in his tabernacle from the strife 
of tongues ; and a new life shall begin for him ; a wiser, per- 
haps a happier, than he has known since he was a little lad in 
the farm-house in pleasant Devon far away. On the loth of 
December he enters the Tower. Little dreams he that for more 
than twelve years those doleful walls would be his home. Lady 
Raleigh obtains leave to share his prison with him, and, after 
having passed ten years without a child, brings him a boy to 
comfort the weary heart. The child of sorrow is christened 
Carew. Little think those around him what strange things that 
child will see before his hairs be gray. She has her maid, and 
he his three servants ; some five or six friends are allowed " to 
repair to him at convenient times." He has a chamber-door 
always open into the lieutenant's garden, where he " has con- 
verted a little hen-house into a still-room, and spends his time 
all the day in distillation." The next spring a grant is made of 
his goods and chattels, forfeited by attainder, to trustees named 
by himself, for the benefit of his family. So far, so well : or, at 
least, not as ill as it might be : but there are those who cannot 
leave the caged lion in peace. ' 

Sanderson, who had married his niece, instead of paying up 
the arrears which he owes on the wine and other offices, brings 
in a claim of £2,000. But the rogue meets his match, and finds 
himself, at the end of a lawsuit, in prison for debt. Greater 
rogues, however, will have better fortune, and break through 
the law cobwebs which have stopped a poor little fly like San- 
derson. For Carr, afterward Lord Somerset, casts his eyes on 
the Sherborne land. It has been included in the conveyance, 
and should be safe;, but there are others who, by instigation 
surely of the devil himself, have had eyes to see a flaw in the 
deed. Sir John Popham is appealed to. Who could doubt the 
result ? He answers, that there is no doubt that the words were 
omitted by the inattention of the engrosser — (Carew Raleigh 
says that but one single word was wanting, which word was 
found notwithstanding in the paper-book, i. e., the draft ;) but 
that the word not being there, the deed is worthless, and the 
devil may have his way. To Carr, who has nothing of his own, 
it seems reasonable enough to help himself to what belongs to 
others ;■ and James gives him the land. Raleigh writes to him, 
gently, gracefully, loftily. Here is an extract : " And for your- 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 51 

self, sir, seeing your fair day is now in the dawn, and mine 
drawn to the evening, your own virtues and the king's grace 
assuring you of many favours and much honour, I beseech you 
not to begin your first building upon the ruins of the innocent ; 
and that their sorrows, with mine, may not attend your first 
plantation." He speaks strongly of the fairness, sympathy, and 
pity, by which the Scots in general had laid him under obliga- 
tion ; argues from it his own evident innocence ; and ends with 
a quiet warning to the young favourite, not to u undergo the 
curse of them that enter into the fields of the fatherless." In 
vain. Lady Raleigh, with her children, entreats James on her 
knees: in vain, again. "I mun ha' the land," is the answer ; 
" I mun ha' it for Carr." And he has it ; patching up the mat- 
ter after awhile by a gift of £8,000 to her and her elder son, in 
requital for an estate of £5,000 a-year. 

So there sits Raleigh, growing poorer day by day, and cling- 
ing more and more to that fair young wife, and her noble boy, 
and the babe whose laughter makes music within that dreary, 
cage. And all day long, as we have seen, he sits over his still, 
compounding and discovering, and sometimes showing himself 
on the wall to the people, who gather to gaze at him, till Wade 
forbids it, fearing popular feeling. In fact, the world outside 
has a sort of mysterious awe of him, as if he were a chained 
magician, who, if he were let loose, might do with them all what 
he would. Salisbury and Somerset are of the same mind. Woe 
to them if that silver tongue should once again be unlocked ! 

The Queen, with a woman's faith in greatness, sends to him 
for " cordials." Here is one of them, famous in Charles the 
Second's days as " Sir Walter's Cordial : " — 

" 5 Zedoary ( ) and saffron, each, 

Distilled water, 

Macerate, &c, and reduced to 1^ pint. 
Compound powder of crabs' claws, 
Cinnamon and Nutmegs, 
Cloves, 

Cardamom seeds, 
Double refined sugar, 

Make a confection." 

Which, so the world believes, will cure all ills which flesh is heir 
to. It does not seem that Raleigh so boasted himself; but the 
people, after the fashion of the time, seem to have called all his 
medicines " cordials," and probably took for granted that it was 
by this particular one that the enchanter cured Queen Anne of a 
desperate sickness, " whereof the physicians were at the farthest 



i 


lb. 


3 


pints. 


16 


oz. 


2 


u 


1 


a 


_i « 
2 1b. 



52 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

end of their studies" (no great way to go in those days) "to find 
the cause, and at a nonplus for the cure." 

Raleigh (this is Sir Anthony Welden's account) asks for his 
reward only justice. Will the Queen ask that certain lords may 
be sent to examine Cobham, "whether he had at any time 
accused Sir Walter of any treason under his hand?" Six are 
sent ; Salisbury among them. Cobham answers, " Never ; nor 
could I : that villain Wade often solicited me, and not so prevail- 
ing, got me by a trick to write my name on a piece of white 
paper. So that if a charge came under my hand, it was forged 
by that villain Wade, by writing something above my hand, with- 
out my consent or knowledge." They return. Salisbury acts as 
spokesman ; and has his equivocation ready. " Sir, my Lord 
Cobham has made good all that ever he wrote or said ; " having, 
by his own account, written nothing but his name. This is Sir 
Anthony Welden's story. One hopes, for the six lords' sake, it 
may not be true ; but we can see no reason, in the morality of 
James's court, why it should not have been. 

So Raleigh must remain where he is, and work on. And he 
does work. As his captivity becomes more and more hopeless, 
so comes out more and more the stateliness, self-help, and energy 
of the man. Till now he has played with his pen : now he will 
use it in earnest ; and use it as perhaps no prisoner ever did. 
Many a good book has been written in a dungeon. Don Quixote, 
the Pilgrim's Progress : beautiful each in its way, and destined 
to immortality : but none like the History of the World, the 
most God-fearing and God-seeing history which we know of 
among human writings. Of Raleigh's prison works we have no 
space to speak, save to say, that there is one fault in them. 
They are written thirty years too late ; they express the creed of 
a buried generation, of the men who defied Spain in the name of 
a God of righteousness, — not of men who cringe before her in 
the name of a god of power and cunning. The captive eagle 
has written with a quill from his own wing — a quill which has 
been wont ere now to soar to heaven. Every line smacks of the 
memories of Nombre and of Zutphen, of Tilbury Fort and of 
Calais Roads ; and many a gray-headed veteran, as he read 
them, must have turned away his face to hide the noble tears, 
as Ulysses from Demodocus when he sang the song of Troy. 
So there sits Raleigh, like the prophet of old, in his lonely tower 
above the Thames, watching the darkness gather upon the land 
year by year, " like the morning spread over the mountains," the 
darkness which comes before the dawn of the Day of The Lord ; 
which he shall never see on earth, though it be very near at 
hand; and asks of each new-comer, Watchman, what of the 
night ? 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AXD HIS TIME. 53 

But there is one bright point at least in the darkness ; one on 
whom Raleigh's eyes, and those of all England, are fixed in 
boundless hope; one who, by the sympathy which attracts all 
noble natures to each other, clings to the hero utterly ; Henry, 
the Crown Prince. " No king but my father would keep such 
a bird in a cage." The noble lad tries to open the door for the 
captive eagle ; but in vain. At least he will make what use he 
can of his wisdom. He. asks him for advice about the new ship 
he is building, and has a simple, practical letter in return, and 
over and above probably the two pamphlets, " Of the Invention 
of Ships," and " Observations on the Navy and Sea Service ; " 
which the Prince will never see. In 1611 he asks Raleigh's 
advice about the foolish double marriage with the Prince and 
Princess of Savoy, and receives for answer two plain-spoken 
discourses as full of historical learning as of practical sound 
sense. 

These are benefits which must be repaid. The father will 
repay them hereafter in his own way. In the meanwhile the 
son does so in his way, by soliciting the Sherborne estate as for 
himself, intending to restore it to Raleigh. He succeeds. Can* 
is bought off for £25,000, where Lady Raleigh had been bought 
off with £8,000 ; but neither Raleigh nor his widow will ever be 
the better for that bargain, and Carr wall get Sherborne back 
again, and probably, in the king's silly dotage, keep the £25,000 
also. 

For, as we said, the Day of The Lord is at hand ; and he 
whose virtues might have postponed it, must be taken away, that 
vengeance may fall where vengeance is due, and men may know 
that verily there is a God who judgeth the earth. 

In November, 1612, Prince Henry falls sick. 

When he is at the last gasp, the poor Queen sends to Raleigh 
for some of the same cordial which had cured her. Medicine is 
sent, with a tender letter, as it well might be ; for Raleigh knew 
how much hung, not only for himself, but for England, on the 
cracking threads of that fair young life. It is questioned at first 
whether it shall be administered. " The cordial," Raleigh says, 
" will cure him or any other of a fever, except in case of 
poison." 

The cordial is administered : but it comes too late. The 
Prince dies, and with him the hopes of all good men. 

****** 

At last after twelve years of prison, Raleigh is free. He is 
sixty-six years old now, gray-headed and worn down by confine- 
ment, study, and want of exercise : but he will not remember that 

u Still in his ashes live their wonted fires." 



54 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Now for Guiana, at last ! which he has never forgotten ; to 
which he has been sending, with his slender means, ship after 
ship to keep the Indians in hope. 

He is freed in March. At once he is busy at his project. In 
August he has obtained the King's commission by the help of Sir 
Ralph Win wood, Secretary of State, who seems to have believed 
in Raleigh. At least Raleigh believed in him. In March next 
year he has sailed, and with him thirteen ships, and more than 
a hundred knights and gentlemen, and among them, strange to say, 
Sir Warham St. Leger. Can this be the quondam Marshal of 
Munster, under whom Raleigh served at Smerwick, six-and-thirty 
years ago ? The question can hardly be answered but by refer- 
ence to Lord Doneraile's pedigree ; but we know of no other 
Sir Warham among the St. Legers. And if it be so, it is a strong 
argument in Raleigh's favour that a man once his superior in 
command, and now probably long past seventy, should keep his 
faith in Raleigh after all his reverses. Nevertheless, the mere 
fact of an unpardoned criminal, said to be " non ens " in law, being 
able in a few months to gather round him such a party, is proof 
patent of what slender grounds there are for calling Raleigh 
" suspected " and " unpopular." 

But he does not sail without a struggle or two. James is too 
proud to allow his heir to match with any but a mighty king, is 
infatuated about the Spanish marriage ; and Gondomar is with 
him, playing with his hopes and with his fears also. 

The people are furious ; and have to be silenced again and 
again ; there is even fear of rioting. The charming and smooth- 
tongued Gondomar can hate; and can revenge, too. Five 'pren- 
tices, who have insulted him for striking a little child, are 
imprisoned and fined several hundred pounds each. And as for 
hating Raleigh, Gondomar had been no Spaniard (to let alone 
the private reasons which some have supposed) had he not hated 
Spain's ancient scourge and unswerving enemy. He comes to 
James, complaining that Raleigh is about to break the peace with 
Spain. Nothing is to be refused him which can further the one 
darling fancy of James ; and Raleigh has to give in writing the 
number of his ships, men, and ordnance, and, moreover, the 
name of the country and the very river whither he is going. 
This paper was given, Carew Raleigh asserts positively, under 
James's solemn promise not to reveal it; and Raleigh himself 
seems to have believed that it was to be kept private ; for he 
writes afterwards to Secretary Winwood, in a tone of astonishment 
and indignation, that the information contained in his paper had 
been sent on to the king of Spain, before he sailed from the 
Thames. Winwood could have told him as much already ; for 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 55 

Buckingham had written to Winwood, on March 28, to ask him 
why he had not been to the Spanish Ambassador " to acquaint 
him with the order taken by his Majesty about Sir W. R/s 
voyage." But however unwilling the Secretary (as one of the 
furtherers of the voyage) may have been to meddle in the matter, 
Gondomar had had news enough from another source ; perhaps 
from James's own mouth. For the first letter to the West Indies, 
about Raleigh, was dated from Madrid, March 19 ; and most 
remarkable it is, that in James's " Declaration," or rather apology, 
for his own conduct, no mention whatsoever is made of his having 
given information to Gondomar. 

Gondomar offered, says James, to let Raleigh go with one or 
two ships only. He might work a mine, and that the King of 
Spain should give him a safe convoy home with all his gold. 
How kind ! And how likely would Raleigh and his fellow ad- 
venturers have been to accept such an offer ; how likely, too, to 
find men who would sail with them on such an errand, to be 
" flayed alive," as many who travelled to the Indies of late years 
had been, or to have their throats cut, tied back to back, after 
trading unarmed and peaceably for a month, as thirty-six of 
Raleigh's men had been but two or three years before in that very 
Orinoco. So James is forced to let the large fleet go ; and to let it 
go well armed also ; for the plain reason, that otherwise it dare 
not go at all ; and in the meanwhile, letters are^ sent from Spain 
in which the Spaniards call the fleet " English enemies," and 
ships and troops are moved up as fast as possible from the Span- 
ish Main. 

But, say some, James was as much justified in telling Gon- 
domar, and the Spaniards in defending themselves. On the 
latter point there is no doubt. 

" They may get who have the will, 
And they may keep who can." 

But it does seem hard on Raleigh, after having laboured in this 
Guiana business for years ; after having spent his money in vain 
attempts to deliver these Guianians from their oppressors. It is 
hard, and he feels it so. He sees that he is not trusted ; that, as 
James himself confesses, his pardon is refused simply to keep a 
hold on him ; that, if he fails, he is ruined. 

As he well asks afterward, " If the king did not think that 
Guiana was his, why let me go thither at all ? He knows that 
it was his by the law of nations, for he made Mr. Harcourt a 
grant of part of it. If it be, as Gondomar says, the King of 
Spain's, then I had no more right to work a mine in it than to 
burn a town." Argument which seems to us unanswerable. But, 



56 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

says James, and others with him, he was forbid to meddle with 
any country occupate or possessed by Spaniards. Southey, too, 
blames him severely for not having told James that the country 
was already settled by Spaniards. We can excuse Southey, but 
not James, for overlooking the broad fact, that all England knew 
it ; that if they did not, Gondomar would have taken care to tell 
them; and that he could not go to Guiana without meddling 
with Spaniards. His former voyages and publications made no 
secret of it. On the contrary, one chief argument for the plan 
had been all through the delivery of the Indians from these very 
Spaniards, who, though they could not conquer them, ill used 
them in every way ; and in his agreement with the Lords about 
the Guiana voyage in 1611, he makes especial mention of the 
very place, which will soon fill such a part in our story, " San 
Thome, where the Spaniards inhabit," and tells the Lords whom 
to ask, as to the number of men who will be wanted " to secure 
Keymish's passage to the mine " against these very Spaniards. 

The plain fact is, that Raleigh went, with his eyes open, to 
take possession of a country to which he believed that he and 
King James had a right, and that James and his favourites, 
when they, as he pleads, might have stopped him by a word, let 
him go, knowing as well as the Spaniards what he intended ; for 
what purpose, but to have an excuse for the tragedy which ended 
all, it is difficult to conceive. " It is evident," says Sir Richard 
Schomburgk, " that they winked at consequences which they 
must have foreseen." 

And here Mr. Napier, on the authority of Count Desmarets, 
brings a grave charge against Raleigh. Raleigh, in his apology, 
protests that he only saw Desmarets once on board of his vessel. 
Desmarets says N in his dispatches, that he was on board of her 
several times, (whether he saw Raleigh or not more than once 
does not appear,) and that Raleigh complained to him of having 
been unjustly imprisoned, stripped of his estate, and so forth, 
(which, indeed, was true enough,) and that he was on that ac- 
count resolved to abandon his country, and, if the expedition 
succeeded, offer himself and the fruit of his labour to the King 
of France. 

If this be true, Raleigh was very wrong. But Sir Richard 
Schomburgk points out that this passage, which Mr. Napier says 
occurs in the last dispatch, was written a month after Raleigh 
had sailed ; and that the previous dispatch, written only four 
days after Raleigh sailed, says nothing about the matter. So 
that it could not have been a very important or fixed resolution 
on Raleigh's part, if it was only to be recollected a month after. 
We do not say (as Sir Richard Schomburgk is very much in- 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 57 

elined to do) that it was altogether a bubble of French fancy. It 
is probable and natural enough that Raleigh, in his just rage at 
finding that James was betraying him, and sending him out with 
a halter round his neck, to all but certain ruin, did say wild 
words — that it was better for him to serve the Frenchman than 
such a master — that perhaps he might go over to the French- 
man after all — or some folly of the kind, in that same rash tone 
which, as we have seen,' has got him into trouble so often already: 
and so we leave the matter, saying, Beware of making any man 
an offender for a word, much less one who is being hunted to 
death in his old age, and knows it. 

However this may be, the fleet sails ; but with no bright 
auguries. The mass of the sailors are "a scum of men;" they 
are mutinous and troublesome ; and what is worse, have got 
among them (as, perhaps, they were intended to have) the 
notion that Raleigh's being still non ens in law absolves them 
from obeying him when they do not choose, and permits them to 
say of. him behind his back what they list. They have long 
delays at Plymouth. Sir Warham's ship cannot get out of the 
Thames. Pennington, at the Isle of Wright, "cannot redeem 
his bread from the bakers," and has to ride back to London to 
get money from Lady Raleigh. The poor Lady has it not, and 
gives a note of hand to Mr. Wood of Portsmouth. Alas for 
her ! She has sunk her £8,000, and, beside that, sold her Wick- 
ham estate for £2,500 ; and all is on board the fleet. " A hun- 
dred pieces " are all the ready money the hapless pair had left 
on earth, and they have parted them together. Raleigh has fifty- 
five, and she forty-five, till God send it back — if, indeed, he ever 
send it. The star is sinking low in the west. Trouble on 
trouble. Sir John Fane has neither men nor money ; Captain 
Witney has not provisions enough, and Raleigh has to sell his 
plate in Plymouth to help him. Courage ! one last struggle to 
redeem his good name ! 

Then storms off Scilly — a pinnace is sunk ; faithful Captain 
King driven back into Bristol ; the rest have to lie by awhile in 
some Irish port for a fair wind. Then Bailey deserts with the 
Southampton at the Canaries ; then " unnatural weather," so 
that a fourteen days' voyage takes forty days. Then " the dis- 
temper " breaks out under the line. The simple diary of that 
sad voyage still remains, full of curious and valuable nautical 
hints ; but recording the loss of friend on friend, four or five 
officers, and, to our great grief, our principal refiner, Mr. Fowler. 
" Crab, my old servant." Next, a lamentable twenty- four hours, 
in which they lose Pigott the lieutenant-general, " mine honest 
frinde Mr. John Talbot, one that had lived with me a leven yeeres 

3* 



58 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

in the Tower, an excellent general sk oiler, and a faithful and 
true man as ever lived," with two " very fair conditioned gentle- 
men," and "mine own cook Francis." Then more officers and men, 
and my " cusen Payton." Then the water is near spent, and 
they are forced to come to half allowance, till they save and 
drink greedily whole canfuls of the bitter rain water. At last 
Kaleigh's own turn comes ; running on deck in a squall, he gets 
wet through, and has twenty days of burning fever ; " never man 
suffered a more furious heat," during which he eats nothing but 
now and then a stewed prune. 

At last they make the land, at the mouth of the Urapoho, far 
south of their intended goal. They ask for Leonard the Indian, 
" who lived with me in England three or four years, the same 
man that took Mr. Harcourt's brother, and fifty men, when they 
were in extreme distress, and had no means to live there but by 
the help of this Indian, whom they made believe that they were 
my men ; " but the faithful Indian is gone up the country, and 
they stood away for Cayenne, " where the cacique (Harry) was 
also my servant, and had lived with me in the Tower two 
years." 

Courage once more, brave old heart ! Here, at least, thou art 
among friends, who know thee for what thou art, and look out 
longingly for thee as their deliverer. 

Courage ! for thou art in fairy land once more ; the land of 
boundless hope and possibility. Though England and England's 
heart be changed, yet God's earth endures, and the harvest is 
still here, waiting to be reaped by those who dare. Twenty 
stormy years may have changed thee, but they have not changed 
the fairy land of thy prison dreams. Still the mighty Ceiba 
trees with their silk pods, tower on the palm-fringed islets ; still 
the dark mangrove thickets guard the mouths of unknown 
streams, whose granite sands are rich with gold. Friendly 
Indians come, and Harry (an old friend) with them, bringing 
maize, peccari pork, and armadillos, plantains, and pine apples, 
and all eat and gather strength ; and Raleigh writes home to. his 
wife, " to say that I may yet be king of the Indians here were 
a vanity. But my name hath lived among them " — as well it 
might. For many a year those simple hearts shall look for him 
in vain, and more than two centuries and a half afterwards, dim 
traditions of the great white chief who bade them stand out to 
the last against the Spaniards, and he would come and dwell 
among them, shall linger among the Carib tribes ; even, say some, 
the tattered relics of an English flag, which he left among them 
that they might distinguish his countrymen. 

Happy for him had he stayed there indeed, and been their king. 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 59 

How easy for him to have grown old in peace at Cayenne. But 
no ; he must on for honour's sake, and bring home if it were but 
a basket full of that ore, to show the king, that he may save his 
credit. And he has promised Arundel that he will return. And 
return he will. So onward he goes to the " Triangle Islands." 
There he sends off five small vessels for Orinoco, with four hun- 
dred men. The faithful Keymis has to command and guide the 
expedition. Sir Warham is lying ill of the fever, all but dead ; 
so George Raleigh is sent in his place as serjeant-major, and 
with him five land companies, one of which is commanded by 
young Walter, Raleigh's son ; another by a Captain Parker, of 
whom we shall have a word to say presently. 

Keymis's orders are explicit. He is to go up ; find the mine, 
and open it ; and if the Spaniards attack him, repel force by 
force : but he is to avoid, if possible, an encounter with them : 
not for fear of breaking the peace, but because he has " a scum 
of men, a few gentlemen excepted, and I would not for all the 
world receive a blow from the Spaniards to the dishonour of our 
nation." There we have no concealment of hostile instructions, 
any more than in Raleigh's admirable instructions to his fleet, 
which after laying down excellent laws for morality, religion, 
and discipline, goes on with clause after clause as to what is to 
be done if they meet " the enemy." What enemy ? Why, all 
Spanish ships which sail the seas ; and who, if they happen to 
be sufficiently numerous, will assuredly attack, sink, burn, and 
destroy Raleigh's whole squadron, for daring to sail for that con- 
tinent which Spain claims as its own. 

Raleigh runs up the coast to Trinidad, and in through the 
serpent's mouth, round Punto Gallo to the famous lake of Pitch, 
where all recruit themselves with fish and armadillos, pheasants 
(Penelope Cristata), palmitos and guavas, and await the return 
of the expedition from the last day of December to the middle 
of February. They see something of the Spaniards meanwhile, 
and what they see is characteristic. Sir John Ferns is sent up 
to the Spanish town, to try if they will trade for tobacco. The 
Spaniards parley, in the midst of the parley pour a volley of 
musketry into them at forty paces, yet hurt never a man, and 
send them off calling them thieves and traitors. Fray Simon's 
Spanish account of the matter is, that Raleigh intended to dis- 
embark his men, that they might march inland on San Joseph. 
How he found out the fact remains to be proved. In the mean- 
while, we shall prefer believing that Raleigh is not likely to have 
told a lie for his own private amusement in his own private 
diary. We cannot blame the Spaniards much ; the advices from 
Spain are sufficient to explain their hostility. 



60 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

On the 29th the Spaniards attack three men and a boy who 
are ashore boiling the fossil pitch ; kill one man, and carry off 
the boy. Raleigh, instead of going up to the Spanish port and 
demanding satisfaction, as he would have been justified in doing 
after this second outrage, remains quietly where he is, expecting 
daily to be attacked by Spanish armadas, and resolved to " burn 
by their sides." Happily, or unhappily he escapes them. Prob- 
ably he thinks they waited for him at Margarita, expecting him 
to range the Spanish Main. 

At last the weary days of sickness and anxiety succeed to days 
of terror. On the 1st of February a strange report comes by an 
Indian. An inland savage has brought confused and contradic- 
tory news down the river, that San Thome is sacked, the gover- 
nor and two Spanish captains slain, (names given) and two Eng- 
lish captains, nameless. After this entry follow a few confused 
ones, set down as happening in January, as to attempts to extract 
the truth from the Indians and negligence of the mariners, who 
are diligent in nothing but pillaging and stealing. — And so ends 
abruptly this sad document. 

The truth comes at last ; but when, does not appear, in a letter 
from Keymis, dated January 8. San Thome has been stormed, 
sacked, and burnt. Four refiners' houses were found in it ; the 
best in the town ; so that the Spaniards have been mining there : 
but no coin or bullion except a little plate. One English captain 
is killed, and that captain is Walter Raleigh, his first-born. He 
died leading them on, when some, " more careful of valour and 
safety, began to recoil shamefully." His last words were, " Lord 
have mercy on me, and prosper our enterprise." A Spanish 
captain, Erinetta, struck him down with the butt of a musket 
after he had received a bullet. John Plessington, his serjeant, 
avenged him by running Erinetta through with his halbert. 

Keymis has not yet been to the mine ; he could not, " by 
reason of the murmurings, discords, and vexations ; " but he will 
go at once, make trial of the mine, and come down to Trinidad 
by the Macareo mouth. He sends a parcel of scattered papers, 
(probably among them the three letters from the king of Spain,) 
a roll of tobacco, a tortoise, some oranges and lemons. u Pray- 
ing God to give you health and strength of body, and a mind 
armed against all extremities, I rest ever to be commanded, your 
lordship's, Keymish." 

" O Absalom, my son, my son, would God I had died for 
thee ! " But weeping is in vain. The noble lad sleeps there 
under the palm-trees, beside the mighty tropic stream, while the 
fair Basset, " his bride in the sight of God," recks not of him 
as she wanders in the woods of Umberleigh, wife to the son of 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 61 

Raleigh's deadliest foe. Raleigh, Raleigh, surely God's bless- 
ing is not on this voyage of thine. Surely He hath set thy 
misdeeds before him, and thy secret sins in the light of his coun- 
tenance. 

Another blank of misery : but his honour is still safe. Key- 
mis will return with that gold ore, that pledge of his good faith 
for which he has ventured all. Surely God will let that come 
after all, now that he has paid as its price his first-born's 
blood ? . . 

At last Keymis returns with thinned numbers. All are 
weary, spirit-broken, discontented, mutinous. Where is the gold 
ore? 

There is none. Keymis has never been to the mine after all. 
His companions curse him as a traitor who has helped Raleigh 
to deceive them into ruin ; the mine is imaginary, a lie. The 
crews are ready to break into open mutiny ; after awhile they 
will do so. 

Yes, God is setting this man's secret sins in the light of his 
countenance. If he has been ambitious, his ambition has pun- 
ished itself now. If he has cared more for his own honour than 
for his wife and children, that sin too has punished itself. If he 
has (which we affirm not) tampered with truth for the sake 
of what seemed to him noble and just ends, that too has pun- 
ished itself; for his men do not trust him. If he has (which 
we affirm not) done any wrong in that matter of Cobham, that 
too has punished itself; for his men, counting him as " non ens " 
in law, will not respect or obey him. If he has spoken after his 
old fashion, rash and exaggerated words, and goes on speaking 
them, even though it be through the pressure of despair, that 
too shall punish itself; and for every idle word that he shall say, 
God will bring him into judgment. And why, but because he 
is noble ? Why, but because he is nearer to God by a whole 
heaven than Buckinghams, Henry Howards, Salisburys, and 
others whom God lets fatten on their own sins, having no under- 
standing, because they are in honour, and have children at their 
hearts desire, and leave the rest of their substance to their babes ? 
Not so does God deal with his elect, when they will try to 
worship at once self and Him ; He requires truth in the inward 
parts, and will purge them till they are true, and single-eyed, 
and full of light. 

Keymis returns with the wreck of his party. The scene be- 
tween him and Raleigh may be guessed. Keymis has excuse on 
excuse. He could not get obeyed after young Raleigh's death: 
he expected to find that Sir Walter was either dead of his sick- 
ness, or of grief for his son, and had no wish " to enrich a com- 



02 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

party of rascals who made no account of him." He dare not go 
up to the mine, because (and here Raleigh thinks his excuse 
fair) the fugitive Spaniards lay in the craggy woods through 
which he would have to pass, and that he had not men enough 
even to hold the town securely. If he reached the mine, and 
left a company there, he had no provisions for them ; and he 
dared not send backward and forward to the town, while the 
Spaniards were in the woods. The warnings sent by Gondomar 
had undone all, and James's treachery had done its work. So 
Keymis, " thinking it a greater error, (so he said,) to discover 
the mine to the Spaniards, than to excuse himself to the Com- 
pany, said that he could not find it." From all which, one 
thing at least is evident, that Keymis believed in the existence 
of the mine. 

Raleigh " rejects these fancies ; " tells him before divers gen- 
tlemen, that " a blind man might find it, by the marks which 
Keymis himself had set down under his hand ; " that " his case 
of losing so many men in the woods," was a mere pretence : 
after Walter was slain, he knew that Keymis had no care of any 
man's surviving. " You have undone me, wounded my credit 
with the King, past recovery." "As you have followed your 
own advice, and not mine, you must satisfy his Majesty. I shall 
be glad if you can do it : but I cannot." There is no use dwell- 
ing on such vain regrets and reproaches. Raleigh perhaps is 
bitter, unjust, though we cannot see that he was ; as he himself 
writes twice, to his wife and to Sir Ralph Winwood, his " brains 
are broken." He writes to them both, and reopens the letters 
to add long postcripts, at his wits' end. Keymis goes off ; 
spends a few miserable days ; and then enters Raleigh's cabin. 
He has written his apology to Lord Arundel, and begs Raleigh 
to allow of it. "No. You have undone me by your obstinacy, 
I will not favour or colour your former folly." " Is that your 
resolution, sir ? " " It is." " I know not then, sir, what course 
to take." And so he goes out, and into his own cabin overhead. 
A minute after, a pistol shot is heard. Raleigh sends up a boy 
to know the reason. Keymis answers from within, that he has 
fired it off because it had been long charged, and all is quiet. 

Half-an-hour after, the boy goes into the cabin. Keymis is 
lying on his bed, the pistol by him. The boy moves him. The 
pistol shot: has broken a rib, and gone no further; but as the 
corpse is turned over, a long knife is buried in that desperate 
heart. Another of the old heroes is gone to his wild account. 

Gradually drops of explanation ooze out. The "Serjeant- 
Major, Raleigh's nephew, and others, confess that Keymis told 
them that he could have brought them in two hours to the mine : 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 63 

but as the young heir was slain, and his father was unpardoned, 
and not like to live, he had no reason to open the mine, either 
for the Spaniard or the King." Those latter words are signifi- 
cant. What cared the old Elizabethan seaman for the weal of 
such a king ? And, indeed, what good to such a king would all 
the mines in Guiana be ? They answered that the king, never- 
theless, had " granted Raleigh his heart's desire under the great 
seal." He replied that " the grant to Raleigh was to a man non 
ens in law, and therefore of no force." Here, too, James's policy 
has worked well. How could men dare or persevere under such 
a cloud ? 

How, indeed, could they have found heart to sail at all ? The 
only answer is, that they knew Raleigh well enough to have utter 
faith in him, and that Keymis himself knew of the mine. 

Puppies at home in England gave out that he had killed him- 
self from remorse at having deceived so many gentlemen with 
an imaginary phantom. Every one of course, according to his 
measure of charity, has power and liberty to assume any motive 
which he will. Ours is simply the one which shows upon the 
face of the documents ; that the old follower, devoted alike to the 
dead son and to the doomed father, feeling that he had, he scarce 
knew how, failed in the hour of need, frittered away the last 
chance of a mighty enterprise, which had been his fixed idea for 
years, and ruined the man whom he adored, avenged upon himself 
the fault of having disobeyed orders, given peremptorily, and to 
be peremptorily executed. 

Here, perhaps, our tale should end ; for all beyond is but the 
waking of the corpse. The last death-struggle of the Eliza- 
bethan heroism is over, and all its remains vanish slowly, in an 
undignified sickening way. All epics end so. After the war of 
Troy, Achilles must die by coward Paris' arrow, in some myste- 
rious confused pitiful fashion ; and stately Hecuba must rail her- 
self into a very dog, and bark for ever shamefully around lonely 
Cynossema. Young David ends as a dotard — Solomon as worse. 
Glorious Alexander must die half of fever, half of drunkenness, 
as the fool dieth. Charles the Fifth, having thrown away all but 
his follies, ends in a convent, a superstitious imbecile ; Napoleon 
squabbles to the last with Sir Hudson Lowe about champagne. 
It must be so ; and the glory must be God's alone. For in 
great men, and great times, there is nothing good or vital, but 
what is of God, and not of man's self. And when he taketh 
away that divine breath they die, and return again to their dust. 
But the earth does not lose ; for when He sendeth forth his spirit 
they live, and renew the face of the earth. A new generation 



64 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

arises, with clearer sight, with fuller experience, sometimes with 
nobler aims ; and, — 

" The old order chRngeth, giving place to the new, 
And God fulfils himself in many ways." 

The Elizabethan epic did not end a day too soon. There was 
no more life left in it ; and God had something better in store for 
England. Raleigh's ideal was a noble one : but God's was nobler 
far. Raleigh would have made her a gold kingdom, like Spain, 
and destroyed her very vitals by that gold, as Spain was de- 
stroyed. And all the while the great and good God was looking 
steadfastly upon that little struggling Virginian village, Raleigh's 
first-born, forgotten in his new mighty dreams, and saying, 
" Here will I dwell, for I have a delight therein." There, and 
not in Guiana; upon the simple tillers of the soil, not among 
wild reckless gold-hunters, would His blessing rest. The very 
coming darkness would bring brighter light. The evil age itself 
would be the parent of new good, and drive across the seas stead- 
fast Pilgrim Fathers, and generous Royalist Cavaliers, to be the 
parents of a mightier nation than has ever yet possessed the 
earth. Verily, God's ways are wonderful, and his counsels in 
the great deep. 

So ends the Elizabethan epic. Must we follow the corpse to 
the grave ? It is necessary. 

And now, " you gentlemen of England, who sit at home at 
ease," what would you have done in like case ? — Your last die 
thrown ; your last stake lost ; your honour, as you fancy, stained 
for ever ; your eldest son dead in battle — What would you have 
done ? What Walter Raleigh did was this. He kept his prom- 
ise. He had promised Lord Arundel to return to England ; and 
return he did. 

But it is said, his real intention, as he himself confessed, was 
to turn pirate, and take the Mexico fleet. 

That wild thoughts of such a deed may have crossed his mind, 
may have been a terrible temptation to him, may even have 
broken out in hasty words, one does not deny. He himself says 
that he spoke of such a thing, " to keep his men together." All 
depends on how the words were spoken. The form of the sen- 
tence, the tone of voice, is every thing. Who could blame him, 
if, seeing some of the captains whom he had most trusted de- 
serting him, his men heaping him with every slander, and as he 
solemnly swore on the scaffold, calling witnesses thereto by 
name, forcing him to take an oath that he would not return 
to England before they would have him, and locking him into 
his own cabin — who could blame him, we ask, for saying, in 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. (35 

that daring off-hand way of his. which has so often before got 
him into trouble, " Come, my lads, do not despair. If the worst 
comes to the worst, there is the Plate-fleet to fall back upon ? " 
When we remember, too, that the taking of the said Plate-fleet 
was, in Raleigh's eyes, an altogether just thing; and that he 
knew perfectly, that if he succeeded therein, he would be backed 
by the public opinion of all England, and probably buy his pardon 
of James, who, if he loved Spain well, loved money better ; our 
surprise rather is, that he did not go and do it. As for any meet- 
ing of captains in his cabin, and serious proposal of such a plan, we 
believe it to be simply one of the innumerable lies which James 
inserted in his declaration, gathered from the tales of men, who 
fearing, (and reasonably.) lest their heads should follow Raleigh's, 
tried to curry favour by slandering him. This " Declaration " 
has been so often exposed, that we may safely pass it by ; and 
pass by almost as safely, the argument which some have drawn 
from a chance expression of his in his pathetic letter to Lady 
Raleigh, in which he " hopes that God would send him some- 
what before his return." To prove an intention of piracy in the 
despairing words of a ruined man writing to comfort a ruined 
wife for the loss of her first-born, is surely to deal out hard 
measure. Heaven have mercy upon us, if all the hasty words 
which woe has wrung from our hearts are to be so judged either 
by man or God ! 

Sir Julius Caesar, again, one of the commission appointed to 
examine him, informs us, that on being confronted with Captains 
St. Leger and Pennington, he confessed that he proposed the 
taking of the Mexico fleet, if the mine failed. To which we 
can only answer, that all depends on how the thing was said, 
and that this is the last fact which we should find in Sir Julius's 
notes, which are, it is confessed, so confused, obscure, and full 
of gajDS, as to be often hardly intelligible. The same remark 
applies to Wilson's story, which we agree with Mr. Tytler in 
thinking worthless. Wilson, it must be understood, is employed, 
after Raleigh's return, as a spy upon him, which office he exe- 
cutes, all confess, (and Wilson himself as much as any.) as falsely, 
treacherously, and hypocritically as did ever sinful man ; and, 
inter alia, he has this, " This day he told me what discourse he 
and the Lord Chancellor had about taking the Plate-fleet, which 
he confessed he would have taken had he lighted on it. To 
which my Lord Chancellor said, " Why, you would have been 
a pirate." " Oh," quoth he, " did you ever know of any that 
were pirates for millions ? They only that wish for small things 
are pirates." Now, setting aside the improbability that Raleigh 
should go out of his way to impeach himself to the man whom 



66 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

he must have known was set there to find matter for his death, 
all, we say, depends on how it was said. If the Lord Chancel- 
lor ever said to Raleigh, " To take the Mexico fleet would be 
piracy," it would have been just like Raleigh to give such an 
answer. The speech is a perfectly true one: Raleigh knew the 
world, no man better ; and saw through its hollowness, and the 
cant and hypocrisy of his generation ; and he sardonically states 
an undeniable fact. He is not expressing his own morality, but 
that of the world, just as he is doing in that passage of his apology, 
about which we must complain of Mr. Napier. " It was a maxim 
of his," says Mr. Napier, " that good success admits of no ex- 
amination." This is not fair. The sentence in the original goes 
on, u so the contrary allows of no excuse, however reasonable 
and just whatsoever." His argument all through the beginning 
of the apology, supported by instance on instance from history, 
is, — I cannot get a just hearing, because I have failed in opening 
this mine. So it is always. Glory covers the multitude of sins. 
But a man who has failed is a fair mark for every slanderer, 
puppy, ignoramus, discontented mutineer ; as I am now. What 
else, in the name of common sense, could have been his argu- 
ment? Does Mr. Napier really think that Raleigh, even if in the 
face of all the noble and pious words which he had written, he 
held so immoral a doctrine, would have been shameless and 
senseless enough ' to assert his own rascality in an apology ad- 
dressed to the most " religious " of kings in the most canting of 
generations ? 

But still more astonished are we at the use which Mr. Napier 
has made of Captain Parker's letter. The letter is written by a 
man in a state of frantic rage and disappointment. There never 
was any mine, he believes now. Keymis's " delays we found 
mere illusions ; for he was false to all men and hateful to him- 
self, loathing to live since he could do no more villainy. I will 
speak no more of this hateful fellow to God and man." And it 
is on the testimony of a man in this temper that we are asked to 
believe that " the admiral and vice-admiral," Raleigh and St. 
Leger, are going to the Western Islands " to look for home- 
ward-bound men," if, indeed, the looking for homeward-bound 
men means really looking for the Spanish fleet, and not merely 
for recruits for their crews. We never recollect (and we have 
read pretty fully the sea-records of those days) such a synonym 
used either for the Mexican or Indian fleet. But let this be as 
it may, the letter proves too much. For, first, it proves, that 
whosoever is not going to turn pirate, our calm and charitable 
friend Captain Parker is ; for " for my part, by the permission of 
God, I will either make a voyage, or bury myself in the sea." 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 07 

Now, what making a voyage is, all men know ; and the sum 
total of the letter is, that a man intending to turn pirate himself, 
accuses, under the influence of violent passion, his comrades of 
doing the like. We may believe him about himself: about 
others, we shall wait for testimony a little less interested. 

But the letter proves too much again. For Parker says that 
" Witney and Woolaston are gone off a-head to look for home- 
ward bound men," thus agreeing with Raleigh's message to his 
wife, that " Witney, for whom I sold all my plate at Plymouth, 
and to whom I gave more credit and countenance than to all the 
captains of my fleet, ran from me at the Grenadas, and Wool- 
aston with him." 

And now, reader, how does this of Witney, and Woolaston, 
and Parker's intentions to pirate separately, (if it be true,) agree 
with King James's story of Raleigh's calling a council of war 
and proposing an attack on the Plate-fleet ? One or the other 
must needs be a lie ; probably both. Witney's ship was of only 
160 tons; Woolaston's probably smaller. Five such ships would 
be required, as any reader of Hakluyt must know, to take a 
single carack ; and it would be no use running the risk of hang- 
ing for any less prize. The Spanish Main was warned and 
armed, and the Western Isles also. Is it possible that these 
two men would have been insane enough in such circumstances, 
to go without Raleigh, if they could have gone with him ? And 
is it possible that he, if he had any set purpose of attacking the 
Plate-fleet, would not have kept them, in order to attempt that 
with him, which neither they nor he could do without each other? 
Moreover, no piratical act ever took place, (and if any had, we 
would have heard enough about it ;) and why is Parker to be 
believed against Raleigh alone, when there is little doubt that 
he slandered all the rest of the captains ? Lastly, it was to this 
very Parker, with Mr. Tresham, and another gentleman, that 
Raleigh appealed by name on the scaffold, as witnesses that it 
was his crew who tried to keep him from going home, and not 
he them. 

Our own belief is, and it is surely simple and rational enough, 
that Raleigh's u brains," as he said, " were broken ; " that he had 
no distinct plan : but that loth to leave the new world without 
a second attempt on Guiana, he went up to Newfoundland to 
revictual, " and with good hope," (as he wrote to Win wood him- 
self,) u of keeping the sea till August with some four reasonable 
good ships," (probably, as Oldys remarks, to try a trading voy- 
age,) but found his gentlemen too dispirited and incredulous, 
his men too mutinous to do any thing; and seeing his ships go 
home one by one, at last followed them himself, because he had 



68 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

promised Arundel and Pembroke so to do, having, after all, as 
he declared on the scaffold, extreme difficulty in persuading his 
men to land at all in England. The other lies about him, as of 
his having intended to desert his soldiers in Guiana, his having 
taken no tools to work the mine, and so forth, one only notices to 
say, that the declaration takes care to make the most of them, 
without deigning (after its fashion) to adduce any proof but 
anonymous hearsays. If it be true that Bacon drew up that 
famous document, it reflects no credit either on his honesty or his 
" inductive science." 

So Raleigh returns, anchors in Plymouth. He finds that 
Captain North has brought home the news of his mishaps, and 
that there is a proclamation against him, (which by-the-bye lies, 
for it talks of limitations and cautions given to Raleigh which clo 
not appear in his commission,) and, moreover, a warrant out 
for his apprehension. He sends his men on shore, and starts 
for London to surrender himself, in company with faithful Cap- 
tain King, who alone clings to him to the last, and from whom 
we have details the next few days. Near Ashburton, he is met 
by Sir Lewis Stukely, his near kinsman, vice-admiral of Devon, 
who has orders to arrest him. Raleigh tells him that he has 
saved him the trouble ; and the two return to Plymouth, where 
Stukely, strangely enough, leaves him at liberty, and rides about 
the country. We' are slow in imputing baseness : but we can- 
not help suspecting from Stukely's subsequent conduct, that he 
had from the first private orders to give Raleigh a chance of 
trying to escape, in order to have a handle against him, such as 
his own deeds had not yet given. 

The ruse, if it existed, then (as it did afterwards) succeeds. 
Raleigh hears bad news. Gondomar has (or has not) told his 
story to the king by crying, " Piratas ! piratas ! piratas ! " and 
then rushing out without explanation. James is in terror lest 
what has happened should break off the darling Spanish match. 
Raleigh foresees ruin, perhaps death. Life is sweet, and Guiana 
is yet where it was. He may win a basketful of the ore still and 
prove himself no liar. He will escape to France. Faithful 
King finds him a Rochelle ship ; he takes boat to her, goes half- 
way, and returns. Honour is sweeter than life, and James may 
yet be just. The next day he bribes the master to wait for him 
one more day, starts for the ship once more, and again returns 
to Plymouth, (King will make oath) of his own free will. The 
temptation must have been terrible, and the sin none. What 
kept him from yielding, but innocence and honour ? He will 
clear himself; and if not, abide the worst. Stukely and James 
found out these facts, and made good use of them afterwards. 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 69 

For now comes "a severe letter from my Lords" to bring 
Raleigh, up as speedily as his health will permit ; and with it 
comes one Mannourie, a French quack, of whom honest King 
takes little note at the time, but who will make himself remem- 
bered. 

And now begins a series of scenes most pitiable.. Raleigh's 
brains are indeed broken. He is old, worn out with the effects 
of his fever, lame, ruined, broken-hearted, and for the first time 
in his life, weak and silly. He takes into his head the paltriest 
notion that he can gain time to pacify the king by feigning him- 
self sick. He puts implicit faith in the rogue Mannourie, whom 
he has never seen before. He sends forward Lady Raleigh to 
London — perhaps ashamed, (as who would not have been ?) to 
play the fool in that sweet presence ; and with her good Captain 
King, who is to engage one Cotterell, an old servant of Raleigh's, 
to find a ship wherein to escape, if the worst comes to the worst. 
Cotterell sends King to an old boatswain of his, who owns a 
ketch. She is to lie off Tilbury ; and so King waits Raleigh's 
arrival. What passed in the next four or five days will never 
be truly known, for our only account comes from two self-con- 
victed villains, Stukely and Mannourie. On these disgusting 
details we shall not enter. First, because we cannot trust a 
word of them ; secondly, because no one will wish to hear them 
who feels, as we do, how pitiable and painful is the sight of a 
great heart and mind utterly broken. Neither shall we spend 
time on Stukely's villainous treatment of Raleigh, (for which he 
had a commission from James in writing,) his pretending to help 
him to escape, going down the Thames in a boat with him, try- 
ing in vain to make honest King as great a rogue as himself. 
Like most rascalities, Stukely's conduct, even as he himself 
states it, is very obscure. All that we can see is, that Cotterell 
told Stukely every thing ; that Stukely bade Cotterell carry on 
the deceit ; that Stukely had orders from head-quarters to incite 
Raleigh to say or do something which might form a fresh ground 
of accusal ; that being a clumsy rogue, he failed, and fell back 
on abetting Raleigh's escape, as a last resource. Be it as it may, 
he throws off the mask as soon as Raleigh has done enough to 
prove an intent to escape ; arrests him, and conducts him to the 
Tower. 

There two shameful months are spent in trying to find out 
some excuse for Raleigh's murder., Wilson is set over him as a 
spy ; his letters to his wife are intercepted. Every art is used 
to extort a confession of a great plot with France, and every 
art fails utterly — simply, it seems to us, because there was no 
plot. Raleigh writes an apology, letters of entreaty, self-justifi- 



70 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

cation, what not ; all, in our opinion, just and true enough ; but 
like his speech on the scaffold, weak, confused — the product of a 
" broken brain." However, his head must come off; and as a 
last resource, it must be taken off upon the sentence of fifteen 
igyears ago, and he who was condemned for plotting with Spain, 
must die for plotting against her. It is a pitiable business : but, 
as Osborne says, in a passage, (p. 108 of his Memoirs of James,) 
for which we freely forgive him all his sins and lies, (and they 
are many,) — 

" As the foolish idolaters were wont to sacrifice the choicest of their 
children to the devil, so our king gave up his incomparable jewel to 
the will of this monster of ambition, (the Spaniard,) under the pre- 
tence of a superannuated transgression, contrary tol^he opinion of the 
• more honest sort of gownsmen, who maintained that his Majesty's 
pardon lay inclusively in the commission he gave him on his setting 
out to sea ; it being incongruous that he, who remained under the 
notion of one dead in the law, should as a general dispose of the lives 
of others, not being himself master of his own." 

But no matter. He must die. The Queen intercedes for 
him, as do all honest men : but in vain. He has twenty-four 
hours' notice to prepare for death ; eats a good breakfast, takes 
a cup of sack and a pipe ; makes a rambling speech, in which 
one notes only the intense belief that he is an honest man, and 
the intense desire to make others believe so, in the very smallest 
.matters ; and then dies smilingly, as one weary of life. One 
makes no comment. Raleigh's life really ended on the day that 
poor Keymis returned from San Thome. 

And then ? 

As we said, Truth is stranger than fiction. No dramatist 
dare invent a " poetic justice" more perfect than fell upon the 
traitor. It is not always so, no doubt. God reserves many a 
great sinner for that most awful of all punishments, impunity. 
But there are crises in a nation's life in which God makes terri- 
ble examples, to put before the most stupid and sensual the choice 
of Hercules, the upward road of life, the downward one which 
leads to the pit. Since the time of Pharaoh and the Red Sea 
host, history is full of such palpable, unmistakable revelations of 
the Divine Nemesis ; and in England, too, at that moment, the 
crisis was there ; and the judgment of God was revealed accord- 
ingly. Sir Lewis Stukely remained it seems at Court ; high in 
favour with James : but he found, nevertheless, that people 
looked darkly on him. Like all self-convicted rogues, he must 
needs thrust his head into his own shame, and one day he goes 
to good old Lord Charles Howard's house ; for being Vice- 
Admiral of Devon, he has affairs with the old Armada hero. 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 71 

The old lion explodes in an unexpected roar, " Darest thou 
come into my presence, thou base fellow, who art reputed the 
common scorn and contempt of all men ? Were it not in mine 
own house, I would cudgel thee with my staff for presuming to 
speak to me ! " Stukely, his tail between his legs, goes off and 
complains to James. " What should I do with him ? Hang 
him ? On my sawle, mon, if I hung all that spoke ill of thee, 
all the trees in the island were too few." Such is the gratitude 
of kings, thinks Stukely, and retires to write foolish pamphlets 
in self-justification, which, unfortunately for his memory, still 
remain to make bad worse. 

Within twelve months he, the rich and proud Vice- Admiral 
of Devon, with a shield of sixteen quarterings, and the blood- 
royal in his veins, was detected debasing the King's coin within 
the precincts of the royal palace, together with his old accom- 
plice, who, being taken, confessed that his charges against 
Raleigh were false. He fled, a ruined man, back to his native 
county, and his noble old seat of Affton ; but Ate is on the heels 
of such, — 

" Slowly she tracks him and sure, as a lyme-hound, 
sudden she grips him, 
Crushing him, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to mortals." 

A terrible plebiscitum had been passed in the West country 
against the betrayer of its last Worthy. The gentlemen closed 
their doors against him ; the poor refused him (so goes the 
legend) fire and water. Driven by the Furies, he fled from 
Affton, and wandered northward down the vale of Taw, away to 
Appledore, and there took boat, and out into the boundless 
Atlantic, over the bar, now crowded with shipping for which 
Raleigh's genius had discovered a new trade and a new world. 

Sixteen miles to the westward, like a blue cloud on the hori- 
zon, rises the Ultima Thule of Devon, the little isle of Lundy. 
There one outlying peak of granite, carrying up a shelf of slate 
upon its southern flank, has risen through the waves, and formed 
an island some three miles long, desolate, flat-headed, fretted by 
every frost and storm, walled all round with four hundred feet 
of granite cliff, sacred only, (then at least,) to puffins and to 
pirates. Over the single landing-place frowns from the cliff the 
keep of an old ruin, " Moresco Castle," as they call it still, where 
some bold rover, Sir John De Moresco, in the times of the old 
Edwards, worked his works of darkness ; a gray, weird, uncanny 
pile of moorstone, through which all the winds of heaven howl 
day and night. 

In a chamber of that ruin died Sir Lewis Stukely, Lord of 
Affton, cursing God and man. 



72 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

His family perished out of Devon. His noble name is now 
absorbed in that of an ancient Virginian merchant of Bideford ; 
and AfFton, burned to the ground a few years after, mouldered 
to an ivied ruin, on whose dark arch the benighted peasant even 
now looks askance as on an evil place, and remembers the tale 
of " the wicked Sir Lewis/' and the curse which fell on him and 
on his house. 

These things are true. Said we not well that reality is 
stranger than romance ? 

But no Nemesis followed James. 

The answer will depend much upon what readers consider to 
be a Nemesis. If to have found England one of the greatest 
countries in Europe, and to have left it one of the most incon- 
siderable and despicable ; if to be fooled by flatterers to the top 
of his vent, until he fancied himself all but a god, while he was 
not even a man, and could neither speak the truth, keep himself 
sober, or look on a drawn sword without shrinking ; if, lastly, 
to have left behind him a son Who, in spite of many chivalrous 
instincts, unknown to his father, had been so indoctrinated in that 
father's vices, as to find it impossible to speak the truth even 
when it served his purpose ; if all these things be no Nemesis, 
then none fell on James Stuart. 

But of that son, at least, the innocent blood was required. 
He, too, had his share in the sin. In Carew Raleigh's simple 
and manful petition to the Commons of England for the restora- 
tion of his inheritance, we find a significant fact, stated without 
one word of comment, bitter or otherwise. At Prince Henry's 
death, the Sherborne lands had been given again to Carr, Lord 
Somerset. To him, too, "the whirligig of time brought round its 
revenges," and he lost them when arraigned and condemned for 
poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury. Then Sir John Digby, after- 
wards Earl of Bristol, begged Sherborne of the king, and had it. 
Pembroke (Shakspeare's Pembroke) brought young Carew to 
Court, hoping to move the tyrant's heart. James saw him and 
shuddered ; perhaps conscience-stricken, perhaps of mere cow- 
ardice. " He looked like the ghost of his father," as he well 
might, to that guilty soul. Good Pembroke advised his young 
kinsman to travel, which he did till James's death in the next year. 
Then coming over, (this is his own story,) he asked of Parliament 
to be restored in blood, that he might inherit aught that might 
fall to him in England. His petition was read twice in the 
■ Lords. Whereon " King Charles sent Sir James Fullarton 
(then of the bed-chamber) to Mr. Raleigh, to command him to 
come to him ; and being brought in, the king, after using him 
with great civility, notwithstanding told him plainly, that when 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME. 73 

he was prince, he had promised the Earl of Bristol to secure 
his title to Sherborne against the heirs of Sir Walter Raleigh ; 
whereon the earl had given him, then prince, ten thousand 
pounds ; that now he was bound to make good his promise, 
being king ; that, therefore, unless he would quit his right and 
title to Sherborne, he neither could nor would pass his bill of 
restoration." 

Young Raleigh, like a good Englishman, " urged," he says, 
" the justness of his cause ; that he desired only the liberty of 
the subject, and to be left to the law, which was never denied 
any freeman." The king remained obstinate. His noble broth- 
er's love for the mighty dead weighed nothing with him, much 
less justice. Poor young Raleigh was forced to submit. The 
act for his restoration was past, reserving Sherborne for Lord 
Bristol, and Charles patched up the scoundrelly affair by allow- 
ing to Lady Raleigh, and her son after her, a life pension of four 
hundred a year. 

Young Carew tells his story simply, and without a note of bit- 
terness ; though he professes his intent to range himself and his 
two sons for the future under the banner of the Commons of 
England, he may be a royalist for any word beside. Even where 
he mentions the awful curse of his mother, he only alludes to its 
fulfilment by — " that which hath happened since to that royal 
family, is too sad and disastrous for me to repeat, and yet too 
visible not to be discerned." We can have no doubt that he tells 
the exact truth. Indeed the whole story fits Charles's character 
to the smallest details. The want of any real sense of justice, 
combined with the false notion of honour ; the implacable ob- 
stinacy ; the contempt for that law by which alone he held his 
crown ; the combination of unkingly meanness in commanding a 
private interview, and shamelessness in confessing his own ras- 
cality — all these are true notes of the man who could attempt to 
imprison the five members, and yet organized the Irish rebellion ; 
who gave up Stafford and Laud to death as his scapegoats, and 
yet pretended to die himself a martyr for that episcopacy which 
they brave, though insane, had defended to death long before. 
But he must have been a rogue early in life, and a needy rogue 
too. That ten thousand pounds of Lord Bristol's money should 
make many a sentimentalist reconsider (if, indeed, sentimentalists 
can be made to reconsider, or even to consider, any thing) their 
notion of him as the incarnation of pious chivalry. 

At least the ten thousand pounds cost Charles dear. The 
widow's curse followed him home. Naseby fight and the White- 
hall scaffold were God's judgment of such deeds, whatever man's 
may be. 

4 



74 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 

[North British Review.] 

The British isles have been ringing, for the last few years, 
with the word " Art," in its German sense, with " High Art/' 
" Symbolic Art," " Ecclesiastical Art," " Dramatic Art," " Tragic 
Art," and so forth ; and every well-educated person is expected, 
now-a-days, to know something about Art. Meanwhile, in spite 
of all translations of German "^Esthetic " treatises, and " Kunst- 
novellen," the mass of the British people cares very little about 
the matter, and sits contented under the imputation of u bad 
taste." Our stage, long since dead, does not revive ; our poetry 
is dying ; our music, like our architecture, only reproduces the 
past ; our painting is only good when it handles landscapes and 
animals, and will so remain unless Mr. Millais succeed in raising 
up some higher school : but, meanwhile, nobody cares. Some 
of the deepest and most earnest minds vote the question, in 
general, a " sham and a snare," and whisper to each other confi- 
dentially, that Gothic art is beginning to be a " bore," and that 
Sir Christopher Wren was a very good fellow after all ; while 
the middle classes look on at the Art movement half amused, as 
with a pretty toy, half sulkily suspicious of Popery and Pagan- 
ism ; and think, apparently, that Art is very well when it means 
nothing, and is merely used to beautify drawing-rooms and shawl 
patterns; not to mention that if there were no painters, Mr. Smith 
could not hand down to posterity likenesses of himself, Mrs. 
Smith, and family. But when "Art " dares to be in earnest, and 

1. Works of Beaumont and Fletcher. 2. Works of Ben Jonson. 3. Massin- 
ger's Plays. Edited by William Gifford, Esq. 4. Works of John Webster. 
Edited, &c, by Rev. Alexander Dyce. 5. Works of James Shirley. Edited 
by Rev. A. Dyce. 6. Works of T. Middleton. Edited by Rev. A. Dyce. 
7. Comedies, tfc. By Mr. William Cartwright. 8. Specimens of English Dra- 
matic Poets. By Charles Lamb. 9. Histriomastix. By W. Prynne, Utter- 
Barrister of Lincoln's Inn. 10. Northbrcoke 's Treatise against Plays, tfc. 11. 
Hie Works of Bishop Hall. 12. Marston's Satires. 13. Jeremy Collier's Short 
View of the Profaneness, tfc, of (he English Stage. 14. Langbaine's English 
Dramatists. 15. Companion to the Playhouse. 16. Riccoboni's Account of the 
Theatres in Europe. 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 75 

to mean something, much more to connect itself with religion, 
Smith's tone alters. He will teach "Art" to keep in what he 
considers its place, and if it refuses, take the law of it, and put 
it into the Ecclesiastical Court. So he says ; and what is more, 
he means what he says ; and as all the world, from Hindostan to 
Canada, knows by most practical proof, what he means, he sooner 
or later does, perhaps not always in the wisest way, but still he 
does it. 

Thus, in fact, the temper of the British nation toward "Art," 
is simply that of the old Puritans, softened, no doubt, and 
widened ; but only enough so as to permit Art, not to encour- 
age it. 

Were we Germans, our thoughts on this curious fact would 
probably take the form of some aesthetic a priori disquisition, 
beginning with " the tendency of the infinite to reveal itself in 
the finite," and ending — who can tell where ? But being Britons, 
we cannot honestly arrogate to ourselves, as our German broth- 
ers seem so fond of doing, any skill in the scientia scientiarum, 
or say, " The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, 
before his works of old. When he prepared the heavens, I 
was there, when he set a compass upon the face of the deep." 
Leaving, therefore, aesthetic science to those who think that they 
comprehend it, we will, as simple disciples of Bacon, deal with 
facts, and with history as " the will of God revealed in facts." 
We will leave those who choose to settle what ought to be, and 
ourselves look patiently at that which actually was once, and 
which may be again ; that so out of the conduct of our old 
Puritan forefathers, (right or wrong,) and their long war against 
"Art," we may learn a wholesome lesson, as we doubtless shall, 
if we will believe firmly that our history is neither more nor less 
than what the old Hebrew prophets called " God's gracious deal- 
ings with his people," and not say in our hearts, like some senti- 
mental girl who sings Jacobite ballads, (written forty years ago by 
men who cared no more for the Stuarts than for the Ptolemies, 
and were ready to kiss the dust off George the Fourth's feet at 
his visit to Edinburgh) — " Victrix causa Deis placuit, sed victa 
puellis." 

The historian of a time of change has always a difficult and 
invidious task. For revolutions, in the great majority of cases, 
arise, not merely from the crimes of a few great men, but from 
a general viciousness and decay of the whole, or the majority of 
the nation ; and that viciousness is certain to be made up, in 
great part, of a loosening of domestic ties, of breaches of the 
Seventh Commandment, and of sins connected with them, which 










76 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

a writer is now hardly permitted to mention. An " evil and 
adulterous generation " has been in all ages and countries the 
one marked out for intestine and internecine strife. That descrip- 
tion is always applicable to a revolutionary generation, whether 
or not it also comes under the class of a superstitious one, " seek- 
ing after a sign from heaven," only half believing its own creed, 
and, therefore, on tiptoe for miraculous confirmations of it at the 
same time that it fiercely persecutes any one who, by attempting 
innovation or reform, seems about to snatch from weak faith the 
last plank which keeps it from sinking into the abyss. In de- 
scribing such an age, the historian lies under this paradoxical 
disadvantage, that his case is actually too strong for him to state 
it. If he tells the whole truth, the easy-going and respectable 
multitude, in easy-going and respectable days like these, will 
either shut their ears prudishly to his painful facts, or reject them 
as incredible, unaccustomed as they are to find similar horrors 
and abominations among people of their own rank, of whom 
they are naturally inclined to judge by their own standard of 
civilization. Thus if any one, in justification of the Reformation, 
and the British hatred of Popery during the sixteenth century, 
should dare to detail the undoubted facts of the Inquisition, and 
to comment on them dramatically enough to make his readers 
feel about them what men who witnessed them felt, he would be 
accused of a " morbid love of horrors." If any one, in order to 
show how the French Revolution of 1793 was really God's judg- 
ment on the profligacy of the ancien regime, were to paint that 
profligacy as the men of the ancien regime unblushingly painted 
it themselves, respectability would have a right to demand, " How 
dare you, sir, drag such disgusting facts from their merited obli- 
vion ?" Those, again, who are really acquainted with the history 
of Henry the Eighth's marriages, are well aware of facts which 
prove him to have been, not a man of violent and lawless pas- 
sions, but of a cold temperament and a scrupulous conscience ; 
but they cannot be stated in print, save in the most delicate and 
passing hints, which will be taken only by those who at once 
understand such matters, and really wish to know the truth ; 
while young ladies in general will still look on Henry as the 
monster in human form, because no one dares, or indeed ought, 
to undeceive them by anything beyond bare assertion without 
proof. 

" But what matter," some one may say, " what young ladies 
think about history ? " This it matters ; that these young ladies 
will some day be mothers, and as such will teach their children 
their own notions of modern history ; and that, as long as men 
confine themselves to the teaching of Roman and Greek history, 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 77 

and leave the history of their own country to be handled exclu- 
sively by their unmarried sisters, so long will slanders, super- 
stitions, and false political principles be perpetuated in the minds 
of our boys and girls. 

But still a worse evil arises from the fact that the historian's case 
is often too strong to be stated. There is always a reactionary 
party, or one at least which lingers sentimentally over the dream 
of past golden ages, such as that of which Cowley says, with a 
sort of naive blasphemy, at which one knows not whether to smile 
or sigh, — 

" When God, the cause to me and men unknown, 
Forsook the royal houses, and his own." 

These have full liberty to say all that they can in praise of the 
defeated system ; but the historian has no such liberty to state 
the case against it. If he dare even to assert that he has coun- 
ter-facts, but dare not state them, he is at once met with a prceju- 
dicium. The mere fact of his having ascertained the truth is 
imputed as a blame to him, in a sort of prudish cant. " What a 
very improper person he must be to like to dabble in such improper 
books that they must not even be quoted." If in self-defence he 
desperately gives his facts, he only increases the feeling against 
him, whilst the reactionists, hiding their blushing faces, find in 
their modesty an excuse for avoiding the truth ; if, on the other 
hand, he content himself with bare assertion, and indicating the 
sources from whence his conclusions are drawn, what care the 
reactionists ? They know well that the public will' not take the 
trouble to consult manuscripts, State papers, pamphlets, rare 
biographies, but will content themselves with ready-made history 
from the pen of Hume or Clarendon, Fraser Tytler, or Miss 
Strickland ; and they therefore go on unblushing to republish 
their old romance, leaving poor truth, after she has been painfully 
haled up to the well's mouth, to tumble miserably to the bottom 
of it again. 

In the face of this danger, we will go on to lay as much as we 
dare of the great cause, Puritans v. Players, before our readers, 
trusting to find some of them at least sufficiently unacquainted 
with the common notions on the point, to form a fair decision. 

What those notions are, is well known. Very many of her 
Majesty's subjects are now of opinion that the first half of the 
Seventeenth Century, (if the Puritans had not interfered and 
spoilt all.) was the most beautiful period of the English nation's 
life ; that in it the chivalry and ardent piety of the middle age 



78 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

were happily combined with modern art and civilization ; that 
the Puritan hatred of the Court, of stage-plays, of the fashions 
of the time, was only a scrupulous and fantastical niceness, bar- 
baric and tasteless, if sincere ; if insincere, the basest hypoc- 
risy; that the stage-plays, though coarse, were no worse than 
Shakspeare, whom everybody reads ; and that if the Stuarts 
patronized the stage they also raised it, and exercised a purify- 
ing censorship. And very many more who do not go all these 
lengths with the reactionists, and cannot make up their mind to 
look to the Stuart reigns either for model churchmen, or model 
landlords, are still inclined to sneer with Walter Scott at the 
Puritan " preciseness ; " and to say lazily, that though, of course, 
something may have been wrong, yet there was no need to make 
such a fuss about the matter ; and that at all events the Puritans 
were men of very bad taste. 

Mr. Gifford, in his introduction to Massinger's Plays, (1813,) 
was probably the spokesman of his own generation, certainly of a 
great part of this generation also, when he informs us, that " with 
Massinger terminated the triumph of dramatic poetry ; indeed, 
the stage itself survived him but a short time. The nation was 
convulsed to its centre by contending factions, and a set of austere 
and gloomy fanatics, enemies to every elegant amusement, and 
every social relaxation, rose upon the ruins of the State. Exas- 
perated by the ridicule with which they had long been covered 
by the stage, they persecuted the actors with unrelenting severity, 
and consigned them, together with the writers, to hopeless obscu- 
rity and wretchedness. Taylor died in the extreme of poverty, 
Shirley opened a little school at Brentford, and Downe, the boast 
of the stage, kept an ale-house at Brentford. Others, and those 
the far greater number, joined the royal standard, and exerted 
themselves with more gallantry than good fortune in the service 
of their old and indulgent master. 

" We have not yet, perhaps, fully estimated, and certainly not yet 
fully recovered what was lost in that unfortunate struggle. The arts 
were rapidly advancing to perfection under the fostering wing of a 
monarch who united in himself taste to feel, spirit to undertake, and 
munificence to reward. Architecture, painting, and poetry, were by 
turns the objects of his paternal care. Shakspeare was his ' closet 
companion/ Jonson his poet, and in conjunction with Inigo Jones, his 
favoured architect, produced those magnificent entertainments," &c. 



He then goes on to account for the supposed sudden fall of 
dramatic art at the Restoration, by the somewhat far-fetched 
theory that — 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 79 

" Such was the horror created in the general mind by the perverse 
and unsocial government from which they had so fortunately escaped, 
that the people appear to have anxiously avoided all retrospect, and 
with Prynne and Vicars, to have lost sight of Shakspeare and 4 his 
fellows.' Instead, therefore, of taking up dramatic poetry where it 
abruptly ceased in the labours of Massinger, they elicited, as it were, 
a manner of their own, or fetched it from the heavy monotony of their 
continental neighbours." 

So is history written, and, what is more, believed. The 
amount of misrepresentation in this passage (which would proba- 
bly pass current with most readers in the present day) is quite 
ludicrous. In the first place, it will hardly be believed that these 
words occur in an essay, which after extolling Massinger as one 
of the greatest poets of his age, second, indeed, only to Shakspeare, 
also informs us, (and, it seems, quite truly,) that so far from hav- 
ing been really appreciated or patronized, he maintained a con- 
stant struggle with adversity, — "that even the bounty of his 
particular friends, on which he chiefly relied, left him in a state 
of absolute dependence," — that while " other w r riters for the stage 
had their periods of good fortune, Massinger seems to have 
enjoyed no gleam of sunshine ; his life was all one misty day, 
and ' shadows, clouds, and darkness rested on it.' " 

So much for Charles's patronage of a really great poet. What 
sort of men he did patronize, practically and in earnest, we shall 
see hereafter, when we come to speak of Mr. Shirley. 

But Mr. GifFord must needs give an instance to prove that 
Charles was "not inattentive to the success of Massinger," and 
a curious one it is ; of the same class, unfortunately, as that w r ith 
the man in the old story, who recorded with pride that the King 
had spoken to him, and — had told him to get out of the way. 

Massinger, in his King and the Subject had introduced Don 
Pedro of Spain thus speaking — 

" Moneys ! We'll raise supplies which way we please, 
And force you to subscribe to blanks, in" which 
We'll mulct you as we shall think fit. The Csesars 
In Rome were wise, acknowledging no law 
But what their swords did ratify, the wives 
And daughters of the senators bowing to 
Their will, as deities," &c. 

Against which passage, Charles, reading over the play before he 
allowed of it, had written, " This is too insolent, and not to be 
printed." Too insolent it certainly was, considering the state of 
public matters in the year 1638. It would be interesting enough 
to analyze the reasons which made Charles dislike in the mouth 
of Pedro sentiments so very like his own ; but we must proceed, 
only pointing out the way in which men determined to repeat the 



80 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

traditional clap-trap about the Stuarts, are actually blind to the 
meaning of the very facts which they themselves quote. 

Where, then, do the facts of history contradict Mr. Gifford ? 

We believe, that so far from the triumph of dramatic poetry 
terminating with Massinger, dramatic art had been steadily grow- 
ing worse from the first years of James ; that instead of the arts 
advancing to perfection under Charles the First, they steadily 
deteriorated in quality, though the supply became more abun- 
dant ; that so far from there having been a sudden change for the 
worse in the drama after the Restoration, the taste of Charles 
the First's and of Charles the Second's court, are indistinguish- 
able ; that the court poets, and probably the actors, also, of the 
early part of Charles the Second's reign, had many of them 
belonged to the Court of Charles the First, as did Davenant, the 
Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, Fanshaw, and Shirley himself; 
that the common notion of a " new manner " having been intro- 
duced from France, after the Restoration, or, indeed, having come 
in at all, is not founded on fact, the only change being that the 
plays of Charles the Second's time were somewhat more stupid, 
and that while five of the seven deadly sins had always had free 
license on the stage, blasphemy and profane swearing were now 
enfranchised to fill up the seven. As for the assertion that the 
new manner (supposing it to have existed) was imported from 
France, there is far more reason to believe that the French 
copied us than we them, and that, if they did not learn from 
Charles the First's poets the superstition of u the three unities," 
they at least learnt to make ancient kings and heroes talk and 
act like seventeenth century courtiers, and to exchange their old 
clumsy masques and translations of Italian and Spanish farces 
for a comedy depicting native scoundrelism. Probably enough, 
indeed, the great and sudden development of the French stage, 
which took place between 1650 and 1660, under Corneille and 
Moliere, was excited by the English cavalier playwrights who 
took refuge in France. 

No doubt, as Mr. Gifford says, the Puritans were exasperated 
against the stage-players by the insults heaped on them ; but the 
cause of quarrel lay far deeper than any such personal sore- 
ness. The Puritans had attacked the players before the players 
meddled with them, and that on principle, with what justification 
must be considered hereafter. But the fact is, (and this seems 
to have been, like many other facts, conveniently forgotten,) that 
the Puritans were by no means alone in their protest against the 
stage, and that the war was not begun exclusively by them. As 
early as the latter half of the sixteenth century, not merely 
Northbrooke, Gosson, Stubs, and Reynolds, had lifted up their 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 81 

voices against them, but Archbishop Parker, Bishop Babington, 
Bishop Hall, and the author of the Mirror for Magistrates. 
The University of Oxford, in 1584, had passed a statute forbid- 
ding common plays and players in the university, on the very 
same moral grounds on which the Puritans objected to them. 
The city of London, in 1580, had obtained from the queen the 
suppression of plays on Sunday, and not long after, " considering 
that play-houses and dicing-houses were traps for young gentle- 
men and others," obtained leave from the queen and privy-coun- 
cil to thrust the players out of the city, and to pull down the 
play-houses, five in number ; and, paradoxical as it may seem, 
there is little doubt that, by the letter of the law, " stage-plays 
and interludes " were, even to the end of Charles the First's 
reign, "unlawful pastime," being forbidden by 14 Eliz., 39 Eliz., 
1 Jacobi, 3 Jacobi, and 1 Caroli, and the players subject to severe 
punishment as " rogues and vagabonds." The Act of 1 Jacobi 
seems even to have gone so far as to repeal the clauses which, in 
Elizabeth's reign, had allowed companies of players the protec- 
tion of a " baron or honourable person of greater degree," who 
might " authorize them to play under his hand and seal of arms." 
So that the Puritans were only demanding of the sovereigns that 
they should enforce the very laws which they themselves had 
made, and which they and their nobles were setting at defiance. 
Whether the plays ought to have been put down, and whether 
the laws were necessary, are different questions ; but certainly 
the court and the aristocracy stood in the questionable, though 
too common, position of men who made laws to prohibit to the 
poor amusements in which they themselves indulged without 
restraint. 

But were these plays objectionable ? As far as the comedies 
are concerned, that will depend on the answer to the question, 
Are plays objectionable, the staple subject of which is adultery ? 
Now, we cannot but agree with the Puritans, that adultery is not 
a subject for comedy at all. It may be for tragedy ; but for 
comedy never. It is a sin ; not merely theologically, but so- 
cially, one of the very worst sins, the parent of seven other 
sins — of falsehood, suspicion, hate, murder, and a whole bevy of 
devils. The prevalence of adultery in any country has always 
been a sign and a cause of social insincerity, division, and revo- 
lution ; and where a people has learnt to connive and laugh at 
it, and to treat it as a light thing, that people has been always 
careless, base, selfish, cowardly— ripe for slavery. And we must 
say, that either the courtiers and Londoners of James and Charles 
the First were in that state, or that the poets were doing their 
best to make them so. 
4 * 



82 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

We shall not shock our readers by any disgusting details on 
this point ; we shall only say, that there is hardly a comedy of 
the seventeenth century, with the exception of Shakspeare's, in 
which adultery is not introduced as a subject of laughter, and 
often made the staple of the whole plot. The seducer is, if not 
openly applauded, at least let to pass as a " handsome gentle- 
man;" the injured husband is, as in that Italian literature of 
w T hich we shall speak shortly, the object of every kind of scorn 
and ridicule. In this latter habit (common to most European 
nations) there is a sort of justice. A man can generally retain 
his wife's affections if he will behave himself like a man, and 
" injured husbands " have for the most part no one to blame but 
themselves. But the matter is not a subject for comedy ; not 
even in that case which has been always too common in France, 
Italy, and the Romish countries, and which seems to have been 
painfully common in England in the seventeenth century, when, 
by a marriage de convenance, a young girl is married up to a 
rich idiot or a decrepit old man. Such things are not comedies, 
but tragedies ; subjects for pity and for silence, not for brutal 
ribaldry. And the men who look on them in the light which 
the Stuart dramatists did are not good men, and do no good ser- 
vice to the country, especially when they erect adultery into a 
science, and seem to take a perverse pleasure in teaching their 
audience every possible method, accident, cause, and consequence 
of it ; always, too, when they have an opportunity, pointing 
" Eastward, Ho ! " i. e. to the city of London, as the quarter 
where court gallants can find boundless indulgence for their pas- 
sions, amid the fair wives of dull and cowardly citizens. If the 
citizens drove the players out of London, the play-wrights took 
good care to have their revenge. The citizen is their standard 
butt. These shallow parasites, and their shallower sovereigns, 
seem to have taken a perverse, and, as it happened, a fatal 
pleasure, in insulting them. Sad it is to see in Shirley's Game- 
ster, Charles the First's favourite play, a passage like that in 
Act I. Scene 1, where old Barnacle proclaims, unblushing, his 
own shame and that of his fellow-merchants. Surely, if Charles 
ever could have repented of any act of his own, he must have 
repented, in many a humiliating after-passage with that same 
city of London, of having given those base words his royal war- 
rant and approbation. 

The tragedies of the seventeenth century are, on the whole, as 
questionable as the comedies. That there are noble plays among 
them here and there, no one denies — no more than that there are ex- 
quisitely amusing plays among the comedies ; but as the staple in- 
terest of the comedies is clulness, so the staple interest of the trage- 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 83 

dies is crime. Revenge, hatred, villainy, incest, and murder upon 
murder, are the constant themes, and (with the exception of Shak- 
speare, Ben Jonson in his earlier plays, and perhaps Massinger) 
they handle these horrors with little or no moral purpose, save 
that of exciting aud amusing the audience, and of displaying 
their own power of delineation, in a way which makes one but 
too ready to believe the accusations of the Puritans, (supported 
as they are by many painful anecdotes,) that the play-writers 
and actors were mostly men of fierce and reckless lives, who 
had but too practical an acquaintance with the dark passions 
which they sketch. This is notoriously the case with most of 
the French novelists of the modern " Literature of Horror," and 
the two literatures are morally identical. We do not know of a 
complaint which can be justly brought against the School of Vic- 
tor Hugo and Dumas, which will not equally apply to the aver- 
age tragedy of the whole period preceding the civil wars. 

This public appetite for horrors, for which they catered so 
greedily, tempted them toward another mistake, which brought 
upon them (and not undeservedly) heavy odium. 

One of the worst counts against Dramatic Art, (as well as 
against Pictorial.) was the simple fact that it came from Italy. 
We must fairly put ourselves into the position of an honest Eng- 
lishman of the seventeenth century, before we can appreciate the 
huge prcej udicium which must needs arise in his mind against 
any thing which could claim a Transalpine parentage. Italy was 
then not merely the stronghold of Popery, though that in itself 
would have been a fair reason for any man's saying, " If the 
root be corrupt, the fruit will be also ; any expression of Italian 
thought and feeling must be probably unwholesome, while her 
vitals are being eaten out by an abominable falsehood, only half 
believed by the masses, and not believed at all by the higher 
classes even of the priesthood, but only kept up for their private 
aggrandizement." But there was more than hypothesis in favour 
of the man who might say this ; there was universal, notorious, 
shocking fact. It was a fact that Italy was the centre where sins 
were invented worthy of the doom of the Cities of the Plain, and 
from whence they spread to all nations who had connection with 
her. We dare give no proof of this assertion. The Italian 
morals and the Italian lighter literature of the sixteenth and of 
the beginning of the seventeenth century were such, that one is 
almost ashamed to confess that one has looked into them, although 
the painful task is absolutely necessary for one who wishes to 
understand either the European society of the time, or the Puri- 
tan hatred of the drama : Non ragionam di lor : ma guar da e 
passa. 



84 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

It is equally a fact, that these vices were imported into Eng- 
land by the young men who, under pretence of learning the 
Italian polish, travelled to Italy. From the days of Gabriel 
Harvey and Lord Oxford, about the middle of Elizabeth's reign, 
this foul tide had begun to set toward England, gaining an addi- 
tional coarseness and frivolity in passing through the French 
Court (then an utter Gehenna) in its course hitherward ; till, to 
judge by Marston's satires, certain members of the higher classes 
had, by the beginning of James's reign, learnt nearly all which 
the Italians had to teach them. Marston writes in a rage, it is 
true — foaming, stamping, and vapouring too much to escape the 
suspicion of exaggeration ; yet he dared not have published the 
things which he does, had he not fair ground for some at least of 
his assertions. And Marston, be it remembered, was no Puritan, 
but a play-wright, and Ben Jonson's friend. 

Bishop Hall, in his Satires, described things as bad enough, 
though not so bad as Marston does ; but what is even more to 
the purpose, he wrote and dedicated to James, a long dissuasive 
against the fashion of running abroad. Whatever may be thought 
of the arguments of " Quo vadis, or a Censure of Travel" its 
main drift is clear enough. Young gentlemen, by going to Italy, 
learnt to be fops and profligates, and probably Papists into the 
bargain. These assertions there is no denying. Since the days 
of Lord Oxford, most of the ridiculous and expensive fashions in 
dress had come from Italy, as well as the newest modes of sin ; 
and the play-wrights themselves make no secret of the fact. 
There is no need to quote instances ; they are innumerable, and 
the stronger ones are not fit to be quoted, any more than the 
titles of the plays in which they occur ; but justifying almost 
every line of Bishop Hall's fierce questions, (of which some of 
the strongest expressions have necessarily been omitted,) — 

" What mischief have we among us which we have not borrowed ? 

" To begin at our skin : who knows not whence we had the variety 
of our vain disguises ? As if we had not wit enough to be foolish un- 
less we were taught it. These dresses being constant in their muta- 
bility, show us our masters. What is it that we have not learned of 
our neighbours, save only to be proud good-cheap ? whom would it 
not vex, to see how that the other sex hath learned to make anticks 
and monsters of themselves ? Whence come their" (absurd fashions) ; 
" but the one from some ill-shaped dame of France, the other from 
the worse-minded courtezans of Italy ? Whence else learned they to 
daub these mud- walls with apothecaries' mortar ; and those high 
washes, which are so cunningly licked on, that the wet napkin of 
Phryne should be deceived ? Whence the frizzled and powdered 
bushes of their borrowed excrement ? As if they were ashamed of 
the head of God's making, and proud of the tire- woman's. Where 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 85 

learned we that devilish art and practice of duel, wherein men seek 
honour in blood, and are taught the ambition of being glorious butch- 
ers of men ? Where had we that luxurious delicacy in our feasts, in 
which the nose is no less pleased than the palate, and the eye no less 
than either ? wherein the piles of dishes make barricadoes against the 
appetite, and with a pleasing incumbrance trouble a hungry guest. 
Where those forms of ceremonious quaffing, in which men have learned 
to make gods of others and beasts of themselves, and lose their reason 
while they pretend to do reason ? Where the lawlessness (miscalled 
freedom) of a wild tongue, that runs, with reins in the neck, through 
the bed-chambers of princes, their closets, their council tables, and 
spares not the very cabinet of their breasts, much less can be barred 
out of the most retired secrecy of inferior greatness ? Where, the 
change of noble attendance and hospitality into four wheels and some 
few butterflies ? Where, the art of dishonesty in practical Machia- 
velism, in false equivocations ? Where, the slight account of that 
filthiness, which is but condemned as venial, and tolerated as not 
unnecessary ? Where, the skill of civil and honourable hypocrisy, in 
those formal compliments, which do neither expect belief from others, 
nor carry any from ourselves ? Where," (and here Bishop Hall 
begins to speak concerning things on which we must be silent, as of 
matters notorious and undeniable.) " Where, that close Atheism, 
which secretly laughs God in the face, and thinks it weakness to 
believe, wisdom to profess any religion ? Where, the bloody and 
tragical science of king-killing, the new divinity of disobedience and 
rebellion ? with too many other evils, wherewith foreign conversa- 
tion hath endangered the infection of our peace ? " — Bishop Hall's 
Quo Vadis, or a Censure of Travel, vol. xii. sect. 22. 

Add to these a third plain fact, that Italy was the mother- 
country of the drama, where it had thriven with wonderful fer- 
tility, ever since the beginning of the sixteenth century. How- 
ever much truth there may be in the common assertion, that the 
old " miracle plays" and u mysteries " were the parents of the 
English drama, (as they certainly were of the Spanish and the 
Italian,) we have yet to learn how much our stage owed, from its 
first rise under Elizabeth, to direct importations from Italy. 
This is merely thrown out as a suggestion ; to establish the fact 
would require a wide acquaintance with the early Italian drama ; 
meanwhile, let two patent facts have their due weight. The 
names of the characters in most of our early regular comedies 
are Italian ; so are the scenes, and so, one hopes, are the man- 
ners ; at least they profess to be so. Next, the plots of many of 
the dramas are notoriously taken from the Italian novelists ; and 
if Shakspeare (who had a truly divine instinct for finding honey 
where others found poison,) went to Cinthio for Othello and 
Measure for Measure, to Bandello for Romeo and Juliet, and to 
Boccaccio for Cymbeline, there were plenty of other playwrights 



86 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

who would go to the same sources for worse matter, or at least, 
catch from these profligate writers somewhat of their Italian 
morality, which exalts adultery into a virtue, seduction into a 
science, and revenge into a duty ; which revels in the horrible 
as freely as any French novelist of the romantic school ; and 
whose only value is its pitiless exposure of the profligacy of the 
Romish priesthood : if an exposure can be valuable which makes 
a mock equally of things truly and falsely sacred, and leaves on 
the reader's mind the fear that the writer saw nothing in heaven 
or earth worthy of belief, respect, or self-sacrifice, save personal 
enjoyment. 

Now this is the morality of the Italian novelists ; and to judge 
from their vivid sketches, (which, they do not scruple to assert, 
w r ere drawn from life, and for which they unblushingly give 
names, places, and all details which might amuse the noble gen- 
tlemen and ladies to whom the stories are dedicated,) this had 
been the morality of Italy for some centuries past. This, also, 
is the general morality of the English stage in the seventeenth 
century. Can we wonder that thinking men should have seen 
a connection between Italy and the stage ? Certainly the play- 
wrights put themselves between the horns of an ugly dilemma. 
Either the vices which they depicted were those of general 
English society, and of themselves also, (for they lived in the 
very heart of town and court foppery,) or else they were 
the vices of a foreign country, with which the English were com- 
paratively unacquainted. In the first case, we can only say, that 
the Stuart age in England was one which deserved purgation of 
the most terrible kind, and to get rid of which the severest and 
most abnormal measures would have been not only justifiable, 
but, to judge by the experience of all history, necessary ; for 
extraordinary diseases never have been, and never will be, eradi- 
cated save by extraordinary medicines. In the second case, the 
playwrights were wantonly defiling the minds of the people, and 
instead of " holding up a mirror to vice," instructing frail virtue 
in vices which she had not learned, and fully justifying old 
Prynne's indignant complaint : — 

" The acting of foreign, obsolete, and long since forgotten villainies, 
on the stage, is so far from working a detestation of them in the spec- 
tators' minds, (who, perchance, were utterly ignorant of them, till they 
were acquainted with them at the playhouse, and so needed no de- 
hortation from them,) that it often excites degenerous dunghill spirits, 
who have nothing in them for to make them eminent, to retluce them 
into practice, of purpose to perpetuate their spurious ill-serving mem- 
ories to posterity, least- wise in some tragic interlude." 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 87 

That Prynne spoke herein nought but sober sense, our own 
police reports will sufficiently prove. It L notorious that the 
representation, in our own days, of Tom and Jerry and of Jack 
Sheppard, did excite dozens of youug lads to imitate the scoun- 
drel heroes of those base dramas ; and such must have been the 
effect of similar and worse representations in the Stuart age. 
No rational man will need the authority of Bishop Babington, 
Doctor Layton, Archbishop Parker, Purchas, Sparkes, Reynolds, 
White, or any one else, Churchman or Puritan, prelate or " peni- 
tent reclaimed play-poet " like Stephen Gosson, to convince him 
that, as they assert, citizens' wives, (who are generally repre- 
sented as the proper subjects for seduction,) * have, even on 
their death-beds, with tears confest that they have received, at 
these spectacles, such evil infections as have turned their minds 
from chaste cogitations, and made them, of honest women, light 
hus-wives ; . . . . have brought their husbands into contempt, 
their children into question, .... and their souls into the 
assault of a dangerous state ; or that " The devices of carrying 
and recarrying letters by laundresses, practising with peddlers to 
transport their tokens by colorable means to sell their merchan- 
dise, and other kinds of policies to beguile fathers of their chil- 
dren, husbands of their wives, guardians of their wards, and 
masters of their servants, were aptly taught in these schools of 

The matter is simple enough. We^H lot allow these 

plays to be acted in our own day b^E e we know that they 
would produce their effects. We shH I call him a madman 
who allowed his daughters or his servW Hfeh represen- 

tations. Why. in all fairness, were ^>^H B^^Tong in con- 
demning that which we now have absolutely forbidden ? 

We will go no further into the sickening details of the licen- 
tiousness of the old playhouses. Gosson, and his colleague the 
anonymous Penitent, assert them, as does Prynne, to have been 
not only schools but ante-chambers to houses of a worse kind, 
and that the lessons learned in the pit were only not practised 
also in the pit. What reason have we to doubt it, who know that 
till Mr. Macready commenced a practical reformation of this 
abuse, for which his name will be ever respected, our own com- 
paratively purified stage was just the same ? Let any one who 
remembers the saloons of Druiy Lane and Covent Garden 
thirty years ago judge for himself what the accessories of the 
Globe or the Fortune must have been, in days when players 

* The Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theatres. Penned by a Play- 
poet. 



88 KINGlRLEY'S miscellanies. 

were allowed to talk inside, as freely as the public behaved 
outside. 

Not that the poets or the players had any conscious intention 
of demoralizing their hearers, any more than they had of cor- 
recting them. We will lay on them the blame of no special 
mains animus ; but, at the same time, we must treat their fine 
words about " holding a mirror up to vice," and " showing the 
age its own deformity," as mere cant, which the men themselves 
must have spoken tongue in cheek. It was as much an insin- 
cere cant in those days as it was when, two generations later, 
Jeremy Collier exposed its impudent falsehood in the mouth of 
Congreve. If the poets had really intended to show vice its 
own deformity they would have represented it, (as Shakspeare 
always does,) as punished, and not as triumphant. It is ridicu- 
lous to talk of moral purpose in works in which there is no moral 
justice. The only condition which can excuse the representation 
of evil is omitted. The simple fact is, that the poets wanted to 
draw a house ; that this could most easily be done by the coarsest 
and most violent means, and that, not being able to find stories 
exciting enough, from their foulness or horror, in the past records 
of sober British society, they went to Italy and Spain for the 
violent passions and wild crimes of southern temperaments, ex- 
cited, and yet left lawless, by a superstition believed in enough 
to darken and brutalize, but not enough to control its victims. 
Romish coun^S m^is now, furnished that strange mixture 
of inward savagery with outward civilization, which is the im- 
moral playwright's jui test material, because, while the inward 
savagery mo^JH ^rons of the audience, the outward civili- 

zation brings the character near enough to them to give them a 
likeness of themselves in their worst moments, which no Mys- 
tery of Cain and Abel, qv Tragedy of Oronooko, can do. 

Does this seem too severe in the eyes of those who value the 
drama for its lessons in human nature ? On that especial point 
something must be said hereafter. Meanwhile hear one of the 
sixteenth century poets ; one who cannot be suspected of any 
leaning toward Puritanism ; one who had as high notions of his 
vocation as any man ; and one who so far fulfilled those notions 
as to become a dramatist inferior only to Shakspeare. Let Ben 
Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to Volpone, tell us, 
in his own noble prose, what he thought of the average morality 
of his contemporary playwrights : — 

/ 

" For if men will impartially and not asquint look toward the 
offices and functions of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 89 

the impossibility of any man's being a good poet without first being a 
good man. He that is said to be able to inform young men to all good 
discipline, inflame grown men to all great virtues, keep old men in 
their best and supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood, recover 
them to their first strength ; that comes forth the interpreter and 
arbitrer of nature, a teacher of things divine no less than human, a 
master in manners ; and can alone (or with a few) effect the business 
of mankind ; this, I take him, is no subject for pride and ignorance to 
exercise their railing rhetorick upon. But it will here be hastily 
answered, that the writers of these days are other things, that not only 
their manners but their natures are inverted, and nothing remaining 
of them of the dignity of poet but the abused name,, which every scribe 
usurps ; that now, especially in dramatick, or (as they term it) stage 
poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation, blasphemies, all licence of 
offence toward God and man is practised. I dare not deny a great 
part of this, (and I am sorry I dare not,) because in some men's abor- 
tive features, (and would God they had never seen the light,) it is 
over true ; but that all are bound on his bold adventure for hell, is a 
most uncharitable thought, and uttered, a more malicious slander. 
For every particular I can (and from a most clear conscience) affirm, 
that I have ever trembled to think toward the least profaneness, and 
have loathed the use of such foul and unwashed," . . . [his ex- 
pression is too strong for quotation] " as is now made the food of the 
scene." 

We are loth to curtail this splendid passage, both for its lofty 
ideal of poetry, and for its corroboratiori^£j;he Puritan com- 
plaints against the stage : but a few lines on^bitill stronger sen- 
tence occurs, — 



•i 

of m^mire 



" The increase of which lust in liberty, $ / With the present 
trade of the stage, in all their masculine in^J >^^what liberal soul 
doth not abhor? Where nothing but filth of tn^mire is uttered, and 
that with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty of solecisms, such 
dearth of sense, so bold prolepses, such racked metaphors, with (in- 
decency) able to violate the ear of a Pagan, and blasphemy to turn 
the blood of a Christian to water." 

So speaks Ben Jonson in 1605, not finding, it seems, play- 
writing a peaceful trade, or play -poets and play-hearers improv- 
ing company. After him, we should say, no farther testimony 
on this unpleasant matter ought to be necessary. He may have 
been morose, fanatical, exaggerative : but his bitter words sug- 
gest at least this dilemma. Either they are true, and the play- 
house atmosphere, (as Prynne says it was,) that of Gehenna : or 
they are untrue, and the mere fruits of spite and envy against 
more successful poets. And what does that latter prove, but 
that the greatest poet of his age (after Shakspeare was gone) was 



90 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

not as much esteemed as some poets whom we know to have 
been more filthy, and more horrible than he ? which, indeed, is 
the main complaint of Jonson himself. It will be rejoined, of 
course, that he was an altogether envious man ; that he envied 
Shakspeare, girded at his York and Lancaster plays, at The 
Winter's Tale and The Tempest, in the prologue to Every Man 
in his Humor ; and, indeed, Jonson's writings, and those of many 
other playwrights, leave little doubt that stage rivalry called out 
the bitterest hatred, and the basest vanity ; and that, perhaps, 
Shakspeare's great soul was giving way to the pettiest passions, 
when in Hamlet lie had his fling at the " aiery of children, little 
eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyran- 
nically clapp'd for't." It may be that he was girding in return 
at Jonson, when he complained that " their writers did them 
wrong to make them complain against their own succession," i. e. 
against themselves, when " grown to common players." Be that 
as it may. Great Shakspeare may have been unjust to only less 
great Jonson, as Jonson was to Shakspeare : but Jonson certainly 
is not so in all his charges. Some of the faults of which he com- 
plains are faults. 

At all events, we know that he was not unjust to the average 
of his contemporaries, by the evidence of the men's own plays. We 
know that the decadence of the stage of which he complains went 
on uninterruptedly ^jter his time, and in the very direction which 
he pointed out. OrJniis point there can be no doubt ; for these 
hodmen of poetry^^^kde a wall in our father's house, and the 
bricks are alive to testify unto this day." So that we cannot 
do better than give a few samples thereof, at least samples de- 
cent enough for^^PKi readers, and let us begin with Jonson 
himself. 

Now, we love Ben Jonson and respect him too, for he was a 
very great genius, immaculate or not. " Rare Ben," with all his 
faults. We can never look without affection on the magnificent 
manhood of that rich free forehead, even though we sigh over 
the petulance and pride which brood upon the lip and eyebrow. 

" Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
The love of love." 

A Michael Angelo, who could laugh, which that Italian one (one 
fancies) never could. We have, too, a sort of delicacy about 
saying much against him ; for he is dead, and can make (for the 
time being at least) no rejoinder. There are dead men whom one 
is not much ashamed to " upset " after their death, because one 
would not have been much afraid of doing so when they were 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 91 

alive. But " Rare Ben " had terrible teeth, and used them too ; 
we should have thought twice ere we snapt at him living, and 
therefore it seems somewhat a cowardly trick to bark securely at 
his ghost. Nevertheless, let us ask him, or at least his readers, 
Do not his own words justify the Puritan complaints ? If so, 
why does he rail at the Puritans for making their complaints ? 
His answer would have been that they railed in their ignorance, 
not merely at low art, as w r e call it now, but at high art and all 
art. Be it so. Here was their fault, if fault it was in those 
days. For to discriminate between high art and low 7 art they 
must have seen both. And for Jonson's wrath to be fair and 
just he must have showm them both. Let us see what the pure 
drama is like which he w r ishes to substitute for the foul drama of 
his contemporaries, and, to bring the matter nearer home, let us 
take one of the plays in which he hits deliberately at the Puri- 
tans, namely, the Alchemist, said to have been first acted in 1610, 
" by the king's majesty's servants." Look, then, at this well- 
known play, and take Jonson at his word. Allow that Ananias 
and Tribulation Wholesome (as they very probably are) are 
fair portraits of a class among the sectaries of the day: but bear 
in mind, too, that if this be allowed, the other characters shall be 
held as fair portraits also. Otherwise, all must be held to be 
caricature ; and then the onslaught on the Puritans vanishes into 
nothing, or worse : in either case, Ananias^nd Tribulation are 
the best men in the play. They palter with their consciences, 
no doubt; but they have consciences, which no one else in the 
play has, except poor Surly, and he, be it remembered, comes to 
shame, and is made a laughing-stock, and " cheats himself," as 
he complains at last, "by that same foolish vice of honesty," 
while in all the rest what have we but every form of human 
baseness ? Lovell, the master, if he is to be considered a nega- 
tive character, as doing no wrong, has, at all events, no more 
recorded of him than the noble act of marrying by deceit a young 
widow 7 for the sake of her money, the philosopher's stone, by the 
by, and highest object of most of the seventeenth century dram- 
atists. If most of the rascals meet with due disgrace, none of 
them is punished ; and the greatest rascal of all, who, when 
escape is impossible, turns traitor, and after deserving the cart 
and pillory a dozen times for his last and most utter baseness, 
" is rewarded by full pardon, and the honour of addressing the 
audience at the play's end in the most smug and self-satisfied 
tone, and of putting himself on you that are my country," not 
doubting, it seems, that there were among them a fair majority 
who would think him a very smart fellow, worthy of all imita- 
tion. 



92 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Now, is this play a moral or an immoral one ? Should we 
take our sons and daughters to see it ? Of its coarseness we say 
nothing. We should not endure it, of course, now-a-days ; and 
on that point something must be said hereafter ; but if we were 
to endure plain speaking as the only method of properly expos- 
ing vice, should we endure the moral which, instead of punishing 
vice, rewards it ? 

And, meanwhile, what sort of a general state of society among 
the Anti-Puritan party does the play sketch ? What but a horri- 
ble background of profligacy and frivolity ? 

A proof, indeed, of the general downward tendencies of the 
age may be found in the writings of Ben Jonson himself. How- 
soever pure and lofty the ideal which he laid down for himself 
(and no doubt honestly) in the Preface to Volpo?ie, he found it 
impossible to keep up to it. Nine years afterwards we find him, 
in his Bartholomew Fair, catering to the low tastes of James the 
First in ribaldry, at which, if one must needs laugh, (as who 
that was not more than man could help doing over that scene 
between Rabbi Busy and the puppets ?) shallow and untrue as 
the gist of the humour is, one feels the next moment as if one 
had been indulging in unholy mirth at the expense of some grand 
old Noah who has come to shame in his cups. 

But lower still does Jonson fall in that masque of the Gypseys 
Metamorphosed, presented to the king in 1621, when Jonson 
was forty-seven, old enough, one would have thought, to know 
better. It is not merely the insincere and all but blasphemous 
adulation which is shocking, — that was but the fashion of the 
times, but the treating these gypseys and beggars, and their 
" thieves' Latin " dialect, their filthiness and cunning, ignorance 
and recklessness, merely as themes for immoral and inhuman 
laughter. Jonson was by no means the only poet of that day to 
whom the hordes of profligate and heathen nomads, which infested 
England, were only a comical phase of humanity, instead of being 
as they would be now, thank God ! objects of national shame 
and sorrow, of pity and love, which would call out in the attempt 
to redeem them the talents and energies of great and good men. 
But Jonson certainly sins more in this respect than any of his 
contemporaries. He takes a low pleasure in parading his inti- 
mate acquaintance with these poor creatures' foul slang and bar- 
baric laws, and is, we should say, the natural father of that lowest 
form of all literature which has since amused the herd, though in a 
form greatly purified, in the form of " Beggars' Operas," " Dick 
Turpins," " Pelhams," and " Jack Sheppards." Every thing 
which is objectionable in such modern publications as these was 
exhibited, in far grosser forms, by one of the greatest poets who 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 93 

ever lived, for the amusement of a king of England ; and yet the 
world still is at a loss to know why sober and God-fearing men 
detested both the poet and the king. 

And that Masque is all the more saddening exhibition of the 
degradation of a great soul, because in it, here and there, occur 
passages of the old sweetness and grandeur, disjecta membra 
poetce, such as these which, even though addressed to James, are 
perfect : — 

" 3d Gypsy. 

" Look how the winds, upon the waves grown tame, 
Take up land sounds upon their purple wings; 
And, catching each from other, bear the same 

To every angle of their sacred springs. 
So will we take his praise, and hurl his name 
About the globe, in thousand airy rings, 
- * * ^ * " * 

Let us pass on — why stay to look upon the fall of such a spirit ? 
There is one point, nevertheless, which we may as well speak 
of here, and shortly ; for spoken of it must be as delicately as is 
possible. The laugh raised at Zeal-for-the-land Busy's expense, 
in Bartholomew Fair, turns on the Puritan dislike of seeing 
women's parts acted by boys. Jonson shirks the question by 
making poor Busy fall foul of puppets instead of live human 
beings ; but the question is shirked, nevertheless. What honest 
answer he could have given to the Puritans, is hard to conceive. 
Prynne, in his Histriomastix, may have pushed a little too far 
the argument drawn from the prohibition in the Mosaic law ; 
yet one would fancy that the practice was forbidden by Moses's 
law not arbitrarily, but because it was a bad practice, which did 
harm, as every antiquarian knows that it did ; and that, there- 
fore, Prynne was but reasonable in supposing that in his day, a 
similar practice would produce a similar evil. Our firm convic- 
tion is that it did so, and that as to the matter of fact, Prynne 
was perfectly right, and that to make a boy a stage-player, was 
pretty certainly to send him to the Devil. Let any man of 
common sense imagine to himself the effect on a young boy's 
mind which would be produced by representing shamelessly 
before a public audience, not merely the language, but the pas- 
sions, of the most profligate women, of such characters as occur 
in almost every play. We appeal to common sense — would any 
father allow his own children to personate, even in private, the 
basest of mankind ? And yet we must beg pardon : for common 
sense, it is to be supposed, has decided against us, as long as 
parents allow their sons to act yearly at Westminster the stupid 
low art of Terence, while grave and reverend prelates and divines 



94 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

look on approving. But we have too good reason to know that the 
Westminster play has had no very purifying influence on the 
minds of the young gentlemen who personate heathen damsels 
" of easy virtue ; " and we only ask, What must have been the 
effect of representing infinitely fouler characters than Terence's 
on the minds of uneducated lads of the lower classes ? Prynne 
and others hint at still darker abominations than the mere defile- 
ment of the conscience; we shall say nothing of them, but that 
from collateral evidence, we believe every word they say ; and that 
when pretty little Cupid's mother, in Jonson's Christmas masque, 
tells how " She could have had money enough for him, had she 
been tempted, and have let him out by the week to the king's 
players," and how " Master Burbadge has been about and about 
with her for him, and old Mr. Hemings too," she had better have 
tied a stone round the child's neck, and hove him over London 
Bridge, than have handed him over to thrifty Burbadge, that he 
might make, out of the degradation of Christ's lamb, more money 
to buy land withal, and settle comfortably in his native town, on 
the fruits of others' sin. Honour to old Prynne, bitter and nar- 
row as he was, for his passionate and eloquent appeals to the 
humanity and Christianity of England, in behalf of those poor 
children, whom not a bishop on the bench interfered to save ; 
but, while they were writing and persecuting in behalf of bap- 
tismal regeneration, left those to perish whom they declared so 
stoutly to be regenerate in baptism. Prynne used that argument 
too, and declared these stage-plays to be among the very " pomps 
and vanities which Christians renounced at baptism." He may 
or may not have been wrong in identifying them with the old 
heathen pantomimes and games of the Circus, and in burying his 
adversaries under a mountain of quotations from the Fathers and 
the Romish divines, (for Prynne's reading seems to have been 
quite enormous.) Those very prelates could express reverence 
enough for the Fathers when they found aught in them which 
could be made to justify their own system, though perhaps it had 
really even less to do therewith than the Roman pantomimes had 
with the Globe Theatre ; but the Church of England had re- 
tained in her Catechism the old Roman word " pomps," as one 
of the things which were to be renounced ; and as " pomps " 
confessedly meant at first those very spectacles of the heathen 
circus and theatre, Prynne could not be very illogical in believ- 
ing that, as it had been retained, it was retained to testify against 
something, and probably against the thing in England most like 
the " pomps " of heathen Rome. Meanwhile, let Churchmen 
decide whether of the two was the better Churchman — Prynne, 
who tried to make the baptismal covenant mean something, or 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 95 

Laud, who allowed such a play as The Ordinary to be written 
by his especial protege Cartwright, the Oxford scholar, and acted 
probably by Oxford scholars, certainly by christened boys. We 
do not pretend to pry into the counsels of the Most High ; but if 
unfaithfulness to a high and holy trust, when combined with lofty 
professions and pretensions, does (as all history tells us that it 
does) draw down the anger and vengeance of Almighty God, 
then we need look no further than this one neglect of the seven- 
teenth century prelates, (whether its cause was stupidity, insin- 
cerity, or fear of the monarchs to whose tyranny they pandered,) 
to discover full reason why it pleased God to sweep them out 
awhile with the besom of destruction. 

There is another feature in the plays of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, new, as far as we know, alike to English literature and 
manners ; and that is, the apotheosis of Rakes. Let the faults 
of the Middle Age, or of the Tuclors, have been what they may, 
that class of person was in their times simply an object of disgust. 
The word which then signified a Rake is, in the Morte oV Arthur, 
(tempt. Ed. IV.) the foulest term of disgrace which can be cast 
upon a knight ; while even up to the latter years of Elizabeth, 
the contempt of parents and elders seems to have been thought a 
grievous sin. In Italy even, fountain of all the abominations of 
the age, respect for the fifth commandment seems to have lin 
gerecl after all the other nine had been forgotten ; we find Casti- 
glione, in his Corteggiano, (about 1520,) regretting the modest 
and respectful training of the generation which had preceded 
him ; and to judge from facts, the Puritan method of education, 
stern as it was, was neither more nor less than the method which, 
a generation before, had been common to Romanist and to Prot- 
estant, Puritan and Churchman. 

But with the Stuart era, (perhaps at the end of Elizabeth's 
reign,) fathers became gradually personages who are to be dis- 
obeyed, sucked of their money, fooled, even now and then robbed 
and beaten, by the young gentleman of spirit ; and the most 
Christian kings, James and Charles, with their queens and court, 
sit by to see ruffling and roystering, beating the watch and break- 
ing windows, dicing, drinking, and duelling, adultery and forni- 
cation, (provided the victim of the latter sin be not a damsel of 
gentle birth,) set forth not merely as harmless amusements for 
young gentlemen, but, (as in Beaumont and Fletcher's play of 
Monsieur Thomas,) virtues without which a man is despicable. 
On this point, as on many others, those who have, for ecclesias- 
tical reasons, tried to represent the first half of the seventeenth 
century as a golden age, have been unfair. There is no immo- 
rality of the court plays of Charles IL's time, which may not be 



96 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

found in those of Charles I.'s. Sedley and Etherege are not 
a whit worse, but only more stupid, than Fletcher or Shirley ; 
and Monsieur Thomas is the spiritual father of all angry lads, 
rufflers, blades, bullies, mohocks, Corinthians, and dandies, down 
to the last drunken clerk who wrenched off a knocker, or robbed 
his master's till to pay his losses at a betting-office. True ; we 
of this generation can hardly afford to throw stones. The scape- 
grace ideal of humanity has enjoyed royal patronage within the 
last half century ; and if Monsieur Thomas seemed fair in the 
eyes of James and Charles, so did Jerry and Corinthian Tom in 
those of " the first gentleman of Europe." Better days, however, 
have dawned : Tom and Jerri/, instead of running three hundred 
nights, would be as little endured on the stage as Monsieur 
Thomas would be ; the heroes who aspire toward that ideal, are 
now consigned by public opinion to Rhadamanthus and the tread- 
mill ; while if, like Monsieur Thomas, they knocked down their 
own father, they would, instead of winning a good wife, be " cut " 
by braver and finer gentlemen than Monsieur Thomas himself; 
but what does this fact prove, save that England has at last dis- 
covered that the Puritan opinion of this matter, (as of some 
others,) was the right one ? 

But there is another aspect in which we must look at the 
Stuart patronage of profligate scape-graces on the stage. They 
would not have been endured on the stage, had they not been 
very common off it ; and if there had not been, too, in the hearts 
of spectators, some lurking excuse for them ; it requires no great 
penetration to see what that excuse must have been. If the 
Stuart age, aristocracy, and court, were as perfect as some fancy 
them, such fellows would have been monstrous in it, and inexcu- 
sable, probably impossible. But if it was, (as it may be proved 
to have been,) an utterly deboshed, insincere, decrepit, and de- 
caying age, then one cannot but look on Monsieur Thomas with 
something of sympathy as well as pity. Take him as he stands ; 
he is a fellow of infinite kindliness, wit, spirit, and courage : but 
with nothing on which to employ those powers. He would have 
done his work admirably in an earnest and enterprising age, as 
a Hudson's Bay Company clerk, an Indian civilian, a captain 
of a man-of-war, — any thing where he could find a purpose and a 
work. Doubt it not. How many a Monsieur Thomas of our 
own days, whom, two years ago, one had rashly fancied capable 
of nothing higher than coulisses and cigars, private theatricals 
and white kid-gloves, has been not only fighting and working 
like a man, but meditating and writing homeward like a Chris- 
tian/ through the dull misery of those trenches at Sevastopol; 
and has found, amid the Crimean snows, that merciful fire of 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 97 

God, which could burn the chaff out of his heart, and thaw the 
crust of cold frivolity into warm and earnest life. And even at 
such a youth's worst, reason and conscience alike forbid us to 
deal out to him the same measure as we do to the offences of the 
cool and hoary profligate, or to the darker and subtler spiritual 
sins of the false professor. But if the wrath of God be not 
unmistakably and practically revealed from Heaven against 
youthful profligacy and disobedience, in after sorrow and shame 
of some kind or other, against what sin is it revealed ? It was 
not left for our age to discover that the wages of sin is death : 
but Charles, his players, and his courtiers, refused to see what 
the very heathen had seen, and so had to be taught the truth 
over again by another and a more literal lesson ; and what 
neither stage-plays nor sermons could teach them, sharp shot and 
cold steel did. 

" But still the Puritans were barbarians for hating Art alto- 
gether." The fact was, that they hated what art they saw in 
England, and that this was low art, bad art, growing ever lower 
and worse. If it be said that Shakspeare's is the very highest 
art, the answer is, that what they hated in him was not his high 
art, but his low art, the foul and horrible elements which he had 
in common with his brother play-writers. True, there is far less 
of these elements in Shakspeare than in any of his compeers : 
but they are there. And what the Puritans hated in him was 
exactly what we have to expunge, before we can now represent 
his plays. If it be said that they ought to have discerned and 
appreciated the higher elements in him, so ought the rest of 
their generation. The Puritans were surely not bound to see in 
Shakspeare what his patrons and his brother poets did not see. 
And it is surely a matter of fact, that the deep spiritual knowledge 
which makes, and will make, Shakspeare's plays, (and them 
alone of all the seventeenth century plays,) a heritage for all 
men and all ages, quite escaped the insight of his contempo- 
raries, who probably put him in the same rank which Webster, 
writing about 1612, has assigned to him. 

" I have ever cherished a good opinion of other men's witty labours, 
especially of that full and heightened style of Master Chapman ; the 
laboured and understanding works of Mr. Jonson ; the no less witty 
composures of the both wittily excellent Mr. Beaumont and Mr. 
Fletcher ; and lastly, (without wrong last to be named), the right 
happy and copious industry of Mr. Shakspeare, Mr. Dekker, and Mr. 
Heywood." 

While Webster, then, the best poet of the reign of Charles 
the First, sees nothing in Shakspeare beyond the same " happy 
5 



98 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

and copious industry," which he sees in Dekker and Hey wood, — 
while Cartwright, perhaps the only young poet of real genius in 
Charles the First's reign, places Fletcher's name " Twixt Jon- 
son's grave and Shakspeare's lighter sound," and tells him that, 

" Shakspeare to thee was dull, whose best wit lies 
I' th' ladies' questions, and the fool's replies. 

■*■ * * ^ * 

Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call. 

.XL- ^ ^* ^1* -^* 

^* ^v *7v ^v "T? 

Nature was all his art ; thy vein was free 
As his, but without his scurrility ; " * 

while even Milton, who, Puritan as he was, loved art with all 
his soul, only remarks on Shakspeare's marvellous lyrical sweet- 
ness, " his native wood-notes wild ; " and what shame to the 
Puritans if they, too, did not discover the stork among the cranes ? 

An answer has been often given to arguments of this kind, 
which deserves a few moments' consideration. It is said, " the 
grossness of the old play-writers was their misfortune, not their 
crime. It was the fashion of the age. It is not our fashion, 
certainly ; but they meant no harm by it. The age was a free- 
spoken one ; and perhaps none the worse for that." Mr. Dyce, 
indeed, the editor of Webster's plays, seems inclined to exalt this 
habit into a virtue. After saying that the licentious and de- 
bauched are made " as odious in representation as they would be 
if they were actually present," (an assertion which must be flatly 
denied, save in the case of Shakspeare, who seldom or never to 
our remembrance, seems to forget that the wages of sin is death, 
and who, however coarse he may be, keeps stoutly on the side 
of virtue,) Mr. Dyce goes on to say, that " perhaps the language 
of the stage is purified in proportion as our morals are deteri- 
orated ; and we dread the mention of the vices which we are not 
ashamed to practise; while our forefathers, under the sway of a 
less fastidious, but a more energetic principle of virtue, were 
careless of words, and only considerate of actions." 

To this clever piece of special pleading we can only answer, 
that the fact is directly contrary, — that there is a mass of unan- 
imous evidence which cannot be controverted, to prove that 
England, in the first half of the seventeenth century, was far 
more immoral than in the nineteenth, — that the proofs lie patent 
to any dispassionate reader ; but that we must be excused from 
defiling our pen by transcribing them. 

* What canon of cleanliness, now lost, did Cartwright possess, which enabled 
him to pronounce Fletcher, or indeed himself, purer than Shakspeare, and his 
times "nicer" than those of James? To our generation, less experienced in 
the quantitative analysis of moral dirt, they will appear all equally foul. 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 99 

Let it be said that coarseness was " the fashion of the age." 
The simple question is, was it a good fashion or a bad ? There 
is no doubt, that in simple states of society, much manly virtue, 
and much female purity, have often consisted with very broad 
language and very coarse manners. But what of that ? Drunk- 
ards may very often be very honest and brave men ; does that 
make drunkenness no sin ? or will honesty and courage prevent 
a man's being the worse for hard drinking ? If so, why have 
we given up coarseness of language ; and why has it been the 
better, rather than the worse part of the nation, the educated 
and religious, rather than the ignorant and wicked, who have 
given it up. Why? Simply because the nation, and all other 
nations on the Continent, in proportion to their morality, have 
found out that coarseness of language is, to say the least, unfit 
and inexpedient ; that if it be wrong to do certain things, it is 
also, on the whole, right not to talk of them ; that even certain 
things which are right and blessed and holy, lose their sanctity 
by being dragged cynically to the light of day, instead of being 
left in the mystery in which God has wisely shrouded them. On 
the whole, one is inclined to suspect the defence of coarseness as 
insincere. Certainly, in our day, it will not hold. If any one 
wishes to hear coarse language in " good society," he can hear it 
in Paris ; but one questions whether Parisian society be now 
" under the sway of a more energetic principle of virtue " than 
our own. The sum total of the matter seems to be, that we 
have found out that on this (and as we shall show hereafter, on - 
several other points,) the old Puritans were right. And, quaintly 
enough, the party in the English Church who hold the Puritans 
most in abhorrence, are the most scrupulous now upon this very 
point, and, in their dread of contaminating the minds of youth, 
are carrying education, at school and college, to such a more than 
Puritan precision, that with the most virtuous and benevolent 
intentions, they are in danger of giving lads a merely conventual 
education, — a hot-house training which will render them incapable 
hereafter of facing either the temptations or the labour of the 
world. They themselves republished Massingers Virgin Martyr, 
because it was a pretty Popish story, probably written by a 
Papist, (for there is every reason to believe that Massinger was 
one,) and setting forth how the heroine was attended all through 
by an angel in the form of a page, and how (not to mention the 
really beautiful ancient fiction about the fruits which Dorothea 
sends back from Paradise,) Theophilus overcomes the devil by 
means of a cross composed of flowers. Massinger's account of 
Theophilus's conversion, will, we fear, make those who know any 
thing of that great crisis of the human spirit, suspect that Mas- 



100 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

singer's experience thereof was but small : the fact which is most 
interesting is, the Virgin Martyr is one of the foulest plays 
known. Every pains has been taken to prove that the indecent 
scenes in the play were not written by Massinger, but by 
Dekker ; on what grounds we know not. If Dekker assisted 
Massinger in the play, as he is said to have done, we are aware 
of no canons of internal criticism, which will enable us to decide, 
as boldly as Mr. GifFord does, that all the indecency is Dekker's, 
and all the poetry Massinger's. He confesses (as indeed he is 
forced to do) that " Massinger himself is not free from dialogues 
of low wit and buffoonery ; " and, then, after calling the scenes 
in question " detestable ribaldry," " a loathsome sorterkin, engen- 
dered of filth and dulness," recommends them to the reader's 
supreme scorn and contempt, — with which feelings the reader 
will doubtless regard them ; but will also, if he be a thinking 
man, draw from them the following conclusions : that even if 
they be Dekker's, (of which there is no proof,) Massinger was 
forced, in order to the success of his play, to pander to the public 
taste, by allowing Dekker to interpolate these villainies ; that the 
play which, above all others of the seventeenth century, contains 
the most supra-lunar rosepink of piety, devotion, and purity, also 
contains the stupidest abominations of any extant play ; and 
lastly, that those who reprinted it for its rosepink piety and 
purity, as a sample of the Christianity of that past golden age of 
High-churchmanship had to leave out about one third of the 
play, for fear of becoming amenable to the laws against abomin- 
able publications. 

No one denies that there are nobler words than any that we 
have quoted in Jonson, in Fletcher, or in Massinger : but nothing 
is stronger than its weakest part ; and there is hardly a play 
(perhaps none) of theirs in which the immoralities of which we 
complain do not exist, — few of which they do not form an integral 
part. 

Now, if this is the judgment which we have to pass on the 
morality of the greater poets, what must the lesser ones be like ? 

Look, then, at Webster's two masterpieces, Vittoria Gorrom- 
borea and the Duchess of Malfi. A few words spent on them 
will surely not be wasted ; for they are pretty generally agreed 
to be the two best tragedies written since Shakspeare's time. 

The whole story of Vittoria Corromborea is one of sin and 
horror. The subject-matter of the play is altogether made up 
of the fiercest and the basest passions. But the play is not a 
study of those passions, from which we may gain a great insight 
into human nature. There is no trace (nor is there, again, in 
the Duchess of Malfi,) of that development of human souls for 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 101 

good or evil, which is Shakspeare's especial power, — the power 
which (far more than any accidental " beauties ") makes his 
plays, to this day, the delight alike of the simple and the wise, 
while his contemporaries are all but forgotten. The highest aim 
of dramatic art is to exhibit the development of the human 
soul ; to construct dramas in which the conclusion shall depend, 
not on the events, but on the characters, and in which the char- 
acters shall not be mere embodiments of a certain passion, or a 
certain " humour," but persons, each unlike all others ; each 
having a destiny of his own, by virtue of his own peculiarities, 
of his own will, and each proceeding toward that destiny, unfold- 
ing his own strength and weakness before the eyes of the audi- 
ence, and in such a way, that, after his first introduction, they 
should be able (in proportion to their knowledge of human 
nature) to predict his conduct under any given circumstances* 
This is indeed " high art : " but we find no more of it in Webster 
than in the rest. His characters, be they old or young, come on 
the stage ready-made, full-grown, and stereotyped ; and, there- 
fore, in general, they are not characters at all, but mere passions 
or humours in a human form. Now and then he essays to draw 
a character ; but it is analytically, by description, not dramati- 
cally, by letting the man exhibit himself in action ; and in the 
Duchess of Malji, he falls into the great mistake of telling, by 
Antonio's mouth, more about the Duke and the Cardinal than 
he afterwards makes them act. Very different is Shakspeare's 
method of giving, at the outset, some single delicate hint about 
his personages, which will serve as a clue to their whole future 
conduct, thus " showing the whole in each part," and stamping 
each man with a personality, to a degree which no other dram- 
atist has ever approached. But the truth is, that the study of 
human nature is not Webster's aim. He has to arouse terror 
and pity, not thought, and he does it in his own way, by blood 
and fury, madmen and screech-owls, not without a rugged power. 
There are scenes of his, certainly, like that of Vittoria's trial, 
which have been praised for their delineation of character ; but 
it is one thing to solve the problem, which Shakspeare has so 
handled in Lear, and Othello, and Richard the Third, " given a 
mixed character to show how he may become criminal," and to 
solve Webster's " given a ready-made criminal, to show what he 
will say and do on a certain occasion." To us the knowledge of 
character shown in Vittoria's trial-scene, is not an insight into 
Vittoria's especial heart and brain, but a general acquaintance 
with the conduct of all bold, bad women when brought to bay. 
Poor Elia, who knew the world from books, and human nature 
principally from his own loving and gentle heart, talks of Vitto- 



102 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

ria's innocence — resembling boldness* — and seeming to see that 
matchless beauty of her face, which inspires such gay confidence 
in her, and so forth. 

Perfectly just and true, not of Vittoria merely, but of the 
average of unfortunate females in the presence of a police magis- 
trate, yet amounting in all merely to this, that the strength of 
Webster's confest master-scene lies simply in intimate acquaint- 
ance with vicious nature in general. We will say no more on 
this matter, save to ask, cui bono ? — was the art of which this 
was the highest manifestation likely to be of much use to man- 
kind, much less to excuse its palpably disgusting and injurious 
accompaniments ? 

The Duchess of Malfi is certainly in a purer and loftier strain ; 
but in spite of the praise which has been lavished on her, we 
must take the liberty to doubt whether the poor Duchess is " a 
person " at all. General goodness and beauty, intense though 
pure affection for a man below her in rank, and a will to carry 
out her purpose at all hazards, are not enough to distinguish her 
from thousands of other women ; but Webster has no such pur- 
pose. What he was thinking and writing of was, not truth, but 
effect ; not the Duchess, but her story ; not her brothers, but 
their rage ; not Antonio, her major-domo and husband, but his 
good and bad fortunes ; and thus he has made Antonio merely 
insipid, the brothers merely unnatural, and the Duchess, (in the 
critical moment of the play,) merely forward. That curious 
scene, in which she acquaints Antonio with her love for him, 
and makes him marry her, is, on the whole, painful. Webster 
himself seems to have felt that it was so ; and, dreading lest he 
had gone too far, to have tried to redeem the Duchess at the end 
by making her break down in two exquisite lines of loving 
shame : but he has utterly forgotten to explain or justify her 
love, by giving to Antonio, (as Shakspeare would probably have 
done,) such strong specialties of character as would compel, and 
therefore excuse his mistress's affection. He has plenty of time 
to do this in the first scenes, — time which he wastes on irrelevant 
matter ; and all that we gather from them is that Antonio is a 
worthy and thoughtful person. If he gives promise of being 
more, he utterly disappoints that promise afterwards. In the 
scene in which the Duchess tells her love, he is far smaller, 
rather than greater than the Antonio of the opening scene, 
though (as there) altogether passive. He hears his mistress's 

* C. Lamb. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, p. 229. From which 
specimens, be it remembered, he has had to expunge not only all the comic 
scenes, but generally the greater part of the plot itself, to make the book at all 
tolerable. 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 103 

declaration just as any other respectable youth might; is exceed- 
ingly astonished, and a good deal frightened ; has to be talked 
out of his fears till one naturally expects a revulsion on the 
Duchess's part into something like scorn or shame, (which might 
have given a good opportunity for calling out sudden strength in 
Antonio :) but so busy is Webster with his business of drawing 
mere blind love, that he leaves Antonio to be a mere puppet, 
whose worthiness we are to believe in only from the Duchess's 
assurance to him that he is perfection of all that a man should 
be ; which, as all lovers are of the same opinion the day before 
the wedding, is not of much importance. 

Neither in his subsequent misfortunes does Antonio make the 
least struggle to prove himself worthy of his mistress's affection. 
He is very resigned, and loving, and so forth. To win renown 
by great deeds, and so prove her in the right to her brothers and 
to all the w 7 orld, never crosses his imagination. His highest aim 
(and that only at last) is slavishly to entreat pardon from his 
proud brothers-in-law, for the mere offence of marrying their 
sister ; and he dies by an improbable accident, the same pious 
and respectable insipidity which he has lived, — " ne valant pas 
le peine qui se donne pour lui." The prison-scenes between the 
Duchess and her tormentors are painful enough, if to give pain 
be a dramatic virtue ; and she appears in them really noble, and 
might have appeared far more so, had Webster taken half as 
much pains with her as he has with the madmen, ruffians, ghosts, 
and screech-owls in which his heart really delights. The only 
character really worked out, so as to live and grow under his 
hand is Bosola, who, of course, is the villain of the piece, and 
being a rough fabric, is easily manufactured with rough tools. 
Still, Webster has his wonderful touches here and there, — 

" Cariola. Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers ! Alas ! 
What will you do with my lady ? Call for help ! 

Duchess. To whom? to our next neighbours ? They are mad folk. 
Farewell, Cariola. 

I pray thee look thou giv'st my little boy 
Some syrop for his <?old; and let the girl 
Say her prayers ere she sleep. — Now, what you please; 
What death?" 

And so the play ends ; as does Vittoria Corrombona, with 
half-a-dozen murders coram populo, raving madness, despair, bed- 
lam and the shambles ; putting the reader marvellously in mind 
of that well-known old book of the same era, Reynolds's God's 
Revenge against the Crying Sins of Murther and Adultery, in 
wdiich, with all due pious horror, and bombastic sermonizing, the 
national appetite for abominations is duly fed with some fifty 
unreadable Spanish histories, French histories, Italian histories, 



104 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

and so forth, one or two of which, of course, are known to have 
furnished subjects for the playwrights of the day. 

The next play-writer whom we are bound to notice is James 
Shirley, one of the many converts to Romanism which those 
days saw, who appears, up to the breaking out of the Civil War, 
to have been the queen's favourite poet, and who, according to 
Langdaine, was " one of such incomparable parts, that he was 
the chief of the second-rate poets, and by some has been thought 
even equal to Fletcher himself." 

We must entreat the reader's attention while we examine Shir- 
ley's Gamester. Whether the examination be a pleasant business 
or not, it is somewhat important, " for," says Mr. Dyce, " the fol- 
lowing memorandum respecting it occurs in the office-book of the 
Master of the Records : ' On Thursday night, 6th of February, 
1633, The Gamester was acted at Court, made by Sherley, out 
of a plot of the king's, given him by mee, and well likte. The 
king sayd it was the best play he had seen for seven years.' " 

This is, indeed, important. We shall now have an opportu- 
nity of fairly testing at the same time the taste of the Royal 
Martyr, and the average merit, at least in the opinion of the 
Caroline Court, of the dramatists of that day. 

The plot which Charles sent to Shirley as a fit subject for his 
muse, is taken from one of those abominable collections of Ital- 
ian novels, of which we have already had occasion to speak, and 
occurs in the second part of the Ducento Novello of Cello Males- 
pini ; and what it is we shall see forthwith. 

The play opens with a scene between one Wilding and his 
ward Penelope, in which he attempts to seduce the young lady, 
in language which has certainly the merit of honesty ; she refuses 
him, but civilly enough, and on her departure Mrs. Wilding 
enters, who, it seems, is the object of her husband's loathing, 
though young, handsome, and in all respects charming enough. 
After a scene of stupid and brutal insults he has the effrontery to 
ask her to bring Penelope to him, at which she naturally goes 
out in anger ; and Hazard, the gamester enters, — a personage 
without a character in any sense of the word. There is next 
some talk against duelling, sensible enough, which arises out of a 
by-plot, — one Delamere having been wounded in a duel by one 
Beaumont, mortally as is supposed. This by-plot runs through 
the play, giving an opportunity for bringing in a father of the 
usual playhouse type, — a Sir Richard Hurry, who is, of course, 
as stupid, covetous, proud, and tyrannical, and unfeeling as play- 
house fathers were then found to be ; but it is of the most com- 
monplace form, turning on the stale trick of a man expecting to 
be hanged for killing some one who turns out after ail to have 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 105 

recovered, and having no bearing whatsoever on the real plot, which 
is this : Mrs. Wilding, in order to win back her husband's affections, 
persuades Penelope to seem to grant his suit, while Mrs. Wilding 
herself is in reality to supply her niece's place, and shame her hus- 
band into virtue. Wilding tells Hazard of the good fortune which 
he fancies is coming, in scenes of which one can only say, that if 
they are not written for the purpose of exciting the passions, it is 
hard to see why they were written at all. But, being with Hazard 
in a gambling-house at the very hour at which he is to meet Pene- 
lope, and having had a run of bad luck, he borrows a hundred 
pounds of Hazard, stays at the table to recover his losses, and sends 
Hazard to supply his place with the supposed Penelope. A few 
hours before Penelope and Hazard have met for the first time, 
and Penelope considers him, as she says to herself aside, " a 
handsome gentleman." He begins, of course, talking lewdly to 
her ; and the lady, so far from being shocked with the freedom of 
her new acquaintance, pays him back in his own coin in such 
good earnest that she soon silences him in the battle of dirt- 
throwing. Of this sad scene, it is difficult to say, whether it 
indicates a lower standard of purity and courtesy in the poet, in 
the audience who endured it, or in the society of which it was, of 
course, intended to be a brilliant picture. If the cavaliers and 
damsels of Charles the First's day were in the habit of talking 
in that way to each other, (and if they had not been, Shirley 
would not have dared to represent them as doing so.) one cannot 
much wonder that the fire of God was needed to burn up 
(though alas ! only for a while) such a state of society, and that 
when needed the fire fell. 

The rest of the story is equally bad. Hazard next day gives 
Wilding voluptuous descriptions of his guilt, and while Wilding 
is in the height of self-reproach at having handed over his victim 
to another, his wife meets him, and informs him that she herself 
and not Penelope has been the victim. Now comes the crisis of 
the plot, the conception which so delighted the taste of the Royal 
Martyr. Wilding finds himself, as he expresses it, " fitted with a 
pair of horns of his own making ; " and his rage, shame, and base 
attempts to patch up his own dishonour by marrying Penelope to 
Hazard, (even at the cost of disgorging the half of her portion, 
which he had intended to embezzle,) furnish amusement to the 
audience to the end of the play ; at last, on Hazard and Penelope 
coming in married. Wilding is informed that he has been deceived, 
and that his wife is unstained, having arranged with Hazard to 
keep up the delusion, in order to frighten him into good beha- 
viour; whereupon Mr. Wilding promises to be a good husband 
henceforth, and the play ends. 



106 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Throughout the whole of this farrago of improbable iniquity 
not a single personage has any mark of personal character, or 
even of any moral quality, save (in Mrs. Wilding's case) that of 
patience under injury. Hazard, the gamester, is chosen as the hero, 
for what reason it is impossible to say ; he is a mere profligate 
nonentity, doing nothing which may distinguish him from any 
other gamester and blackguard, save that he is, as we are told, 

" A man careless 

Of wounds ; and though he have not had the luck 

To kill so many as another, dares 

Fight with all them that have." 

He, nevertheless, being in want of money, takes a hundred 
pounds from a foolish old city merchant (city merchants are 
always fools in the seventeenth century) to let his nephew, young 
Barnacle, give him a box on the ear in a tavern, and (after the 
young cit has been transformed into an intolerable bully by the 
fame so acquired) takes another hundred pounds to the repentant 
uncle for kicking the youth back into his native state of peaceful 
cowardice. With the exception of some little humour in these 
scenes with young Barnacle the whole play is thoroughly stupid. 
We look in vain for any thing like a reflection, a sentiment, even 
a novel image. Its language, like its morality, is all but on a 
level with the laboured vulgarities of the Relapse or the Pro- 
voked Wife, save that (Shirley being a confessed copier of the 
great dramatists of the generation before him) there is enough of 
the manner of Fletcher and Ben Jonson kept up to hide, at first 
sight, the utter want of any thing like their matter ; and as one 
sickens with contempt at the rakish swagger, and the artificial 
smartness of his coxcombs, one regrets the racy and unaffected 
blackguardism of the earlier poets' men. 

This, forsooth, is the best comedy that Charles had heard for 
seven years, and the plot which he himself furnished for the 
occasion, fitted to an English audience by a Romish convert. 

And yet there is one dramatist of that fallen generation over 
whose memory one cannot but linger, fancying what he would 
have become, and wondering why so great a spirit was checked 
suddenly ere half-developed, by the fever which carried him off, 
with several other Oxford worthies, in 1648, when he was at 
most thirty -two (and according to one account only twenty-eight) 
years old. Let which of the two dates be the true one, Cart- 
wright must always rank among our wondrous youths, by the side 
of Prince Henry, the Admiral Crichton, and others, of whom 
one's only doubt is, whether they were not too wondrous, too 
precociously complete for future development We find Dr. 



PLAYS AND PURITAXS. 107 

Fell, sometime Bishop of Oxford, saying that " Cartwright was 
the utmost man could come to ; " we read how his body was as 
handsome as his soul ; how he was an expert linguist, not only in 
Greek and Latin, but in French and Italian, an excellent orator, 
admirable poet ; how Aristotle was no less known to him than 
Cicero and Virgil, and his metaphysical lectures preferred to 
those of all his predecessors, the Bishop of Lincoln only except- 
ed, " and his sermons, lastly," as much admired as his other 
composures, and how one fitly applied to him that saying of Aris- 
totle concerning CEschron the poet, that "he could not tell what 
CEschron could not do." We find pages on pages of high-flown 
epitaphs and sonnets on him, in which the exceeding bad taste of 
his admirers makes one incline to doubt the taste of him whom 
they so bedaub with praise : and certainly, in spite of all due 
admiration for the Crichton of Oxford, one is unable to indorse 
Mr. Jasper Mayne's opinion, that 

" In thee Ben Jonson still held Shakspeare's stile: " 

or that he possest 

" Lucan's bold heights match'd to staid Virgil's care, 
Martial's quick salt, joined to Musseus' tongue." 

This superabundance of eulogy, when we remember the men and 
the age from which it comes, tempts one to form such a con- 
ception of Cartwright as, indeed, the portrait prefixed to his 
works (ed. 1651) gives us; the offspring of an over-educated 
and pedantic age, highly stored with every thing but strength 
and simplicity ; one in whom genius has been rather shaped 
(perhaps cramped) than developed : but genius was present, 
without a doubt, under whatsoever artificial trappings ; and Ben 
Jonson spoke but truth when he said, " My son Cartwright writes 
all like a man." It is impossible to open a page of The Lady 
Errant, The Royal Slave, The Ordinary^ or Love's Convert, 
without feeling at once that we have to do with a man of a very 
different stamp from any (Massinger perhaps alone excepted) 
who was writing between 1630 and 1640. The specific density 
of the poems, so to speak, is far greater than that of any of his 
contemporaries ; everywhere is thought, fancy, force, varied learn- 
ing. He is never weak or dull, though he fails often enough, is 
often enough wrong-headed, fantastical, affected, and has never 
laid bare the deeper arteries of humanity, for good or for evil. 
Neither is he altogether an original thinker ; as one would expect 
he has over-read himself; but then he has done so to good pur- 
pose. If he imitates he generally equals. The table of fare in 



108 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

The Ordinary smacks of Rabelais, but then it is worthy of 
Rabelais ; and if one cannot help suspecting that The Ordinary 
would never have been written had not Ben Jonson written The 
Alchemist, one confesses that Ben Jonson need not have been 
ashamed to have written the play himself, although the plot, as all 
Cartwright's are, is somewhat confused and inconsequent. If he 
be platonically sentimental in Love's Convert, his sentiment is of 
the noblest and purest ; and the confessed moral of the play is 
one which that age needed, if ever age on earth did. 

" 'Tis the good man's office 
To serve and reverence woman, as it is 
The fire's to burn; for as our souls consist 
Of sense and reason, so do yours, more noble, 
Of sense and love, which doth as easily calm 
All your desires, as Reason quiets ours. 

•^k -^ -^ -it -^* -iii -^* 

*K -^ -TV *K *?v *?v -^ 

Love, then, doth work in you, what Reason doth 
In us, here only lies the difference, — 
Ours wait the lingering steps of Age and Time, 
But the woman's soul is ripe when it is young; 
So that in us what we call learning, is 
Divinity in you, whose operations, 
Impatient of delay, do outstrip time." 

For the sake of such words, in the midst of an evil and adul- 
terous generation, we will love young Cartwright in spite of the 
suspicion that, addressed as the play is to Charles, and probably 
acted before his queen, the young rogue had been playing the 
courtier somewhat, and racking his brains for pretty sayings 
which would exhibit as a virtue that very uxoriousness of the 
poor king's, which at last cost him his head. The Royal Slave, 
too, is a gallant play, right-hearted and lofty from beginning to 
end, though enacted in an impossible court-cloud-world akin to 
that in which the classic heroes and heroines of Corneille and 
Racine call each other Monsieur and Madame. 

As for his humour ; he, alas ! can be dirty like the rest, when 
necessary : but humour he has, of the highest quality. The 
Ordinary is full of it ; and Moth, the Antiquary, though too 
much of a lay figure, and depending for his amusingness on his 
quaint antiquated language, is such a sketch as Mr. Dickens need 
not have been ashamed to draw. 

The Royal Slave seems to have been considered, both by the 
Court and by his contemporaries, his masterpiece. And justly 
so ; yet our pleasure at Charles's having shown, for once, good 
taste, is somewhat marred by Langbaine's story, that the good 
acting of the Oxford scholars, " stately scenes, and richness of 
the Persian habits," had as much to do with the success of the 
play as its " stately style," and " the excellency of the ' songs, 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 109 

which were set by that admirable composer, Mr. Henry James." 
True it is, that the songs are excellent, as are all Cartwright's ; 
for grace, simplicity, and sweetness, equal to any (save Shak- 
speare's) which the seventeenth century produced : but curiously 
enough, his lyric faculty seems to have exhausted itself in these 
half-dozen songs. His minor poems are utterly worthless, out- 
Co wleying Cowley in frigid and fantastic conceits ; and his various 
addresses to the king and queen are as bombastic, and stupid, and 
artificial, as any thing which disgraced the reigns of Charles II. 
or his brother. 

Are we to gather from this fact that Cartwright was not really 
an original genius, but only a magnificent imitator ? that he could 
write plays well because others had written them well already, 
but only for that reason ; and that for the same reason, when he 
attempted detached lyrics and addresses, he could only follow the 
abominable models which he saw around him ? We know not : 
for surely in Jonson and Shakspeare's minor poems he might 
have found simpler and sweeter types ; and even in those of 
Fletcher, who appears, from his own account, to have been his 
especial pattern ; Shakspeare, however, as we have seen, he 
looked clown on, as did the rest of his generation. 

Cartwright, as an Oxford scholar, is of course a worshipper of 
Charles, and a hater of Puritans. We do not wish to raise a 
prejudice against so young a man, by quoting any of the ridicu- 
lous, and often somewhat abject, rant with which he addresses 
their majesties on their return from Scotland, on the queen's 
delivery, on the birth of the Duke of York, and so forth — for in 
that he did but copy the tone of grave divines and pious prelates ; 
but he, unfortunately for his fame, is given (as young geniuses 
are sometimes) to prophesy ; and two of his prophecies, at least, 
have hardly been fulfilled. He was somewhat mistaken, when, 
on the birth of the Duke of York, he informed the world that 

" The state is now past fear ; and all that we 
Need wish besides is perpetuity." 

And, after indulging in various explanations of the reason why 
" Nature " showed no prodigies at the birth of the future patron of 
Judge Jeffreys, which if he did not believe them, are lies, and if 
he did, are very like blasphemies, declares that the infant is 

" A son of Mirth, 
Of Peace and Friendship; 'tis a quiet birth." 

Nor, again, if spirits in the other world have knowledge of human 
affairs, can we be now altogether satisfied with his augury as to 
the capacities of the New England Puritans, — 



110 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

" They are good silly people ; souls that will 
Be cheated without trouble : one eye is 
Put out with zeal, th' other with ignorance, 
And yet they think they're eagles." 

Whatsoever were the faults of Cotton Mather's band of pioneers, 
and they were many, silliness was certainly not among them. 
But such was the Court fashion. Any insult, however shallow, 
ribald, and doggrel, (and all these terms are just of the mock- 
Puritan ballad which Sir Christopher sings in The Ordinary », 
just after an epithalamium so graceful and melodious, though a 
little " warm " in tone, as to really be out of place in such a fel- 
low's mouth,) passes current against men, who were abroad the 
founders of the United States, and the forefathers of the acutest 
and most enterprising nation on earth, and who at home proved 
themselves, by terrible fact, not only the physically stronger 
party, but the more cunning. But so it was fated to be. A deep 
mist of conceit, fed by the shallow breath of parasites, players, 
and pedants, wrapt that unhappy Court in blind security, till u the 
breaking was as the swelling out of a high wall, which cometh 
suddenly in an instant." 

" But after all, what Poetry and Art there was in that day, 
good or bad, all belonged to the royalists." 

All ? There are those who think that, if mere concettism be 
a part of poetry, Quarles is a ten times greater poet than Cowley 
or George Herbert, and equal, perhaps, to Yaughan and Withers. 
On this question, and on the real worth of the seventeenth century 
lyrists, something may be said hereafter in this Review. Mean- 
while, there are those, too, who believe John Bunyan, considered 
simply as an artist, to be the greatest dramatic author whom 
England has seen since Shakspeare ; and there linger, too, in the 
libraries and the ears of men, words of one John Milton. He 
was no rigid hater of the beautiful, merely because it was heathen 
and popish ; no more, indeed, were many highly-educated and 
highly-born gentlemen of the Long Parliament; no more was 
Cromwell himself, whose delight was (if we may trust that dou- 
ble renegade Waller,) to talk over with him the worthies of 
Rome and Greece, and who is said (and we believe truly) to 
have preserved for the nation Raphael's cartoons, and Andrea 
Mantegna's triumph, when Charles' pictures were sold. But 
Milton had steeped his whole soul in romance. He had felt the 
beauty and glory of the chivalrous middle age as deeply as Shak- 
speare himself; he had as much classical lore as any Oxford 
pedant. He felt to his heart's core, (for he sang of it, and had 
he not felt it he would only have written of it,) the magnificence 



PLAYS AND PUEITANS. HI 

and worth of really high art, of the drama when it was worthy 
of man and of itself. 

" Of gorgeous tragedy, 

Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line, 
Or the tale of Troy divine, 
And what, though rare of later age, 
Ennobled hath the later stage." 

No poet, perhaps, shows wider and truer sympathy with every 
form of the really beautiful in art, and nature, and history ; and 
yet Jhe was a Puritan. 

Yes, Milton was a Puritan ; one, who instead of trusting him- 
self, and his hopes of the universe, to second-hand hearsays, sys- 
tems, and traditions, had looked God's Word and his own soul 
in the face, and determined tp act on that which he had found. 
And therefore it is, that to open his works at any stray page, 
after these effeminate Carolists, is like falling asleep in a stifling 
city drawing-room, amid Pococo French furniture, not without 
untidy traces of last night's ball, and awaking in an alpine valley, 
amid the scent of sweet cyclamens and pine boughs, to the music 
of trickling rivulets and shouting hunters, and to see above your 
head the dark cathedral aisles of mighty pines, and here and 
there, above them and beyond, the spotless peaks of everlasting 
snow ; while far beneath your feet — 

" The hemisphere of earth, in clearest ken, 
Stretched to the amplest reach of prospect, lies." 

Take any, — the most hackneyed passage of Comus, the Allegro, 
the Penseroso, the Paradise Lost, and see the freshness, the 
sweetness, and the simplicity, which is strangely combined with 
the pomp, the self-restraint, the earnestness of every word ; take 
him even, as an experiment um cruris, when he trenches upon 
ground heathen and questionable, and tries the court poets at 
their own weapons, — 

" Or whether, (as some sages sing,) 
The frolic wind that breathes the spring, 
Zephyr with Aurora playing, 
As he met her once a-maying, 
There on beds of violets blue, 
And fresh-blown roses washed in dew " 

but why quote what all the world knows ? — Where shall we find 
such real mirth, ease, sweetness, dance and song of words in any 
thing written for five-and-twenty years before him ? True, he 
was no great dramatist. He never tried to be one : but there 
was no one in his generation who could have written either 
Comus or Samson Agonistes. And if, as is commonly believed, 



112 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

and as his countenance seems to indicate, he was deficient in 
humour, so were his contemporaries, with the sole exception of 
Cartwright. Witty he could be, and bitter: but he did not live 
in a really humorous age ; and if he has none of the rollicking 
fun of the fox-hound puppy, at least he has none of the obscene 
gibber of the ape. 

After all, the great fact stands, that the only lasting poet of 
that generation was a Puritan ; one, who, if he did not write 
dramas in sport, at least acted dramas in earnest. For drama 
means, etymologically, action and doing ; and of the drama there 
are, and always will be, two kinds : one the representative, the 
other the actual ; and for a world wherein there is no superabun- 
dance of good deeds, the latter will be always the better kind. 
It is good to represent heroical action in verse, and on the stage : 
it is good to " purify," as old Aristotle has it, " the affections by 
pity and terror." There is an ideal tragedy, and an ideal comedy 
also, which one can imagine as an integral part of the highest 
Christian civilization. But when " Christian " tragedy sinks 
below the standard of heathen Greek tragedy ; when, instead of 
setting forth heroical deeds, it teaches the audience new possi- 
bilities of crime, and new excuses for those crimes ; when, instead 
of purifying the affections by pity and terror, it confounds the 
moral sense by exciting pity and terror merely for the sake of 
excitement, careless whether they be well or ill directed, then it 
is of the devil, and the sooner it returns to its father, the better 
for mankind. When, again, comedy, instead of stirring a divine 
scorn of baseness, or even a kindly and indulgent smile at the 
weaknesses and oddities of humanity, learns to make a mock of 
sin, — to find excuses for the popular frailties which it pretends 
to expose, — then it also is of the devil, and to the devil let it go ; 
while honest and earnest men, who have no such exceeding love 
of "Art," that they must needs have bad art rather than none at 
all, do the duty which lies nearest them, amid clean whitewash 
and honest prose. The whole theory of "Art, its dignity and 
vocation," seems to us at times questionable, if coarse facts are 
to be allowed to weigh, (as we suppose they are,) against deli- 
cate theories. If we are to judge by the examples of Italy, the 
country which has been most of all devoted to the practice of 
"Art," and by that of Germany, the country which has raised the 
study of Art into a science, then a nation is not necessarily free, 
strong, moral, or happy, because it can " represent " facts, or can 
understand how other people have represented them. We do 
not hesitate to go further, and to say, that the present imbecility 
of Germany is to be traced in a great degree to that pernicious 
habit of mind which makes her educated men fancy it enough to 



PLAYS AXD PURITANS. 113 

represent noble thoughts and feelings, or to analyze the repre- 
sentations of them : while they do not bestir themselves, or 
dream that there is the least moral need for bestirring them- 
selves, toward putting these thoughts and feelings into practice. 
Goethe herein is indeed the typical German : God grant that no 
generation may ever see such a typical Englishman; and that 
our race, remembering ever that the golden age of the English 
drama was one of private immorality, public hypocrisy, ecclesi- 
astical pedantry, and regal tyranny, and ended in the temporary 
downfall of Church and Crown, may be more ready to do fine 
things, than to write fine books ; and act in their lives, as those 
old Puritans did. a drama which their descendants may be glad 
to put on paper for them, long after they are dead. 

For surely these Puritans were dramatic enough, poetic enough, 
picturesque enough. We do not speak of such fanatics as Balfour of 
Burley. or any other extravagant person whom it may have suited 
Walter Scott to take as a typical personage. We speak of the aver- 
age Puritan nobleman, gentleman, merchant, or farmer, and hold 
him to have been a picturesque and poetical man. — a man of 
higher imagination and deeper feeling than the average of Court 
poets, and a man of sound taste also. "What is to be said for his 
opinions about the stage, has been seen already : but it seems to 
have escaped most persons'" notice, that either all England is 
grown very foolish, or the Puritan opinions on several matters 
have been justified by time. 

On the matter of the stage, the world has certainly come over 
to their way of thinking. Few educated men now think it worth 
while to go to see any play, and that exactly for the same rea- 
sons as the Puritans put forward; and still fewer educated men 
think it worth while to write plays : finding that since the grosser 
excitements of the imagination have become forbidden themes, 
there is really very little to write about. 

But in the matter of dress and of manners, the Puritan triumph 
has been complete. Even their worst enemies have come over 
to their side, and " the whirligig of Time has brought in his 
revenges." 

Their canons of taste have become those of all England, and 
High Churchmen, who still call them round-heads and cropped 
ears, go about rounder-headed and closer cropt than they ever 
went. They held it more rational to cut the hair to a comforta- 
ble length than to wear effeminate curls down the back. And 
we cut ours much shorter than they ever did. They held, (with 
the Spaniards, then the finest gentlemen in the world.) that sad, 
i. e. dark colours, above all black, were the fittest for stately and 
earnest gentlemen. We all. from the Tractarian to the Any- 



114 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

thingarian, are exactly of the same opinion. They held that 
lace, perfumes, and jewelry on a man were marks of unmanly 
foppishness and vanity ; and so hold the finest gentlemen in 
England now. They thought it equally absurd and sinful for a 
man to carry his income on his back, and bedizen himself out in 
reds, blues, and greens, ribbons, knots, slashes, and " treble quad- 
ruple dasdalian ruffs, built up on iron and timber, (a fact,) which 
have more arches in them for pride than London Bridge for 
use." We, if we met such a ruffed and ruffled worthy as used to 
swagger by hundreds up and down Paul's Walk, not knowing 
how to get a dinner, much less to pay his tailor, should look on 
him as firstly a fool, and secondly a swindler ; while, if we met 
an old Puritan, we should consider him a man gracefully and 
picturesquely drest, but withal in the most perfect sobriety of 
good taste ; and when we discovered, (as we probably should,) 
over and above, that the harlequin cavalier had a box of salve 
and a pair of dice in one pocket, a pack of cards and a few pawn- 
brokers' duplicates in the other ; that his thoughts were altogether 
of citizens' wives, and their too easy virtue ; and that he could 
not open his mouth without a dozen oaths, we should consider 
the Puritan, (even though he did quote Scripture somewhat 
through his nose,) as the gentleman ; and the courtier as a most 
offensive specimen of the " snob triumphant," glorying in his 
shame. The picture is not ours, nor even the Puritan's. It is 
Bishop Hall's, Bishop Earle's, — it is Beaumont's, Fletcher's, 
Jonson's, Shakspeare's, — the picture which every dramatist, as 
well as satirist, has drawn of the " gallant " of the seventeenth 
century. No one can read those writers honestly without seeing 
that the Puritan, and not the Cavalier conception of what a 
British gentleman should be, is the one accepted by the whole 
nation at this day. 

In applying the same canon to the dress of women, they w T ere 
wrong. As in other matters, they had hold of one pole of a 
double truth, and erred in applying it exclusively to all cases. 
But there are two things to be said for them ; first, that the 
dress of that day was palpably an incentive to the profligacy of 
that day, and therefore had to be protested against ; in these 
more moral times, ornaments and fashions may be harmlessly 
used, which then could not be used without harm. And next, 
it is undeniable that sober dressing is more and more becoming 
the fashion among well-bred women, and that among them, too, 
the Puritan canons are gaining ground. 

We have just said that the Puritans held too exclusively to 
one pole of a double truth. They did so, no doubt, in their 
hatred of the drama. Their belief that human relations were, if 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 115 

not exactly sinful, at least altogether carnal and un spiritual, 
prevented their conceiving the possibility of any truly Christian 
drama, and led them at times into strange and sad errors, like 
that New England ukase of Cotton Mather's, who punished the 
woman who should kiss her infant on the Sabbath day. Yet 
their extravagancies on this point were but the honest revulsion 
from other extravagancies on the opposite side. If the undis- 
tinguishing and immoral Autotheism of the playwrights, and 
the luxury and heathendom of the higher classes, first in Italy 
and then in England, were the natural revolt of the human mind 
against the Manichseism of Popish monkery, then the severity 
and exclusiveness of Puritanism was a natural and necessary 
revolt against that luxury and immorality ; a protest for man's 
God-given superiority over nature, against that Naturalism which 
threatened to end in sheer brutality. While Italian prelates 
have found an apologist in Mr. Poscoe, and English playwrights 
in Mr. Gifford, the old Puritans, who felt and asserted, however 
extravagantly, that there was an eternal law, which was above 
all Borgias, and Machiavels, Stuarts, and Fletchers, have surely 
a right to a fair trial. If they went too far in their contempt for 
humanity, certainly no one interfered to set them right. The 
Anglicans of that time, who held intrinsically the same anthro- 
pologic notions, and yet wanted the courage and sincerity to 
carry them out as honestly, neither could nor would throw any 
light upon the controversy ; and the only class who sided with 
the poor playwrights in asserting that there were more things in 
man, and more excuses for man, than were dreamt of in Prynne's 
philosophy, were the Jesuit Casuists, who, by a fatal perverse- 
ness, used all their little knowledge of human nature to the same 
undesirable purpose as the playwrights ; namely, to prove how 
it was possible to commit every conceivable sinful action without 
sinning. No wonder that in an age in which courtiers and theatre 
haunters were turning Romanists by the dozen, and the priest- 
ridden Queen was the chief patroness of the theatre, the Puritans 
should have classed players and Jesuits in the same category, 
and deduced the parentage of both alike from the father of lies. 

But as for these Puritans having been merely the sour, nar- 
row, inhuman persons they are vulgarly supposed to have been, 
credat Judceus. There were sour and narrow men enough among 
them ; so there were in the opposite party. No Puritan could 
have had less poetry in him, less taste, less feeling, than Laud 
himself. • But is there no poetry save words ? no drama save 
that which is presented on the stage ? Is this glorious earth, 
and the souls of living men, mere prose, as long as carent vote 
sacro, who will, forsooth, do them the honour to make poetry 



116 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

out of a little of them, (and of how little !) by translating them 
into words, which he himself, just in proportion as he is a good 
poet, will confess to be clumsy, tawdry, ineffectual ? Was there 
no poetry in these Puritans, because they wrote no poetry ? We 
do not mean now the unwritten tragedy of the battle-psalm and 
the charge ; but simple idyllic poetry and quiet home-drama, 
love-poetry of the heart and the hearth, and the beauties of every- 
day human life ? Take the most commonplace of them : was 
Zeal-for-Truth Thoresby, of Thoresby Rise in Deeping Fen, 
because his father had thought fit to give him an ugly and silly 
name, the less of a noble lad? Did his name prevent his being 
six feet high ? Were his shoulders the less broad for it, his 
cheek the less ruddy for it ? He wore his flaxen hair of the same 
length that every one now wears theirs, instead of letting it hang 
half-way to his waist in essenced curls ; but was he therefore 
the less of a true Viking's son, bold-hearted as his sea-roving 
ancestors, who won the Danelagh by Canute's side, and settled 
there on Thoresby Rise, to grow wheat and breed horses, gene- 
ration succeeding generation, in the old moated grange ? He 
carried a Bible in his jack-boots ; but did that prevent him, as 
Oliver rode past him with an approving smile on Naseby field, 
thinking himself a very handsome fellow, with his mustache and 
imperial, and bright-red coat, and cuirass well polished, in spite 
of many a dint, as he sate his father's great black horse as grace- 
fully and firmly as any long-locked and essenced cavalier in front 
of him ? Or did it prevent him thinking too, for a moment, with 
a throb of the heart, that sweet Cousin Patience, far away at 
home, could she but see him, might have the same opinion of 
him as he had of himself ? Was he the worse for the thought ? 
He was certainly not the worse for checking it the next instant, 
with manly shame for letting such " carnal vanities " rise in his 
heart, while he was " doing the Lord's work " in the teeth of 
death and hell : but was there no poetry in him then ? No 
poetry in him, iive minutes after, as the long rapier swung round 
his head, redder and redder at every sweep ? We are befooled 
by names. Call him Crusader instead of Roundhead, and he 
seems at once (granting him only sincerity, which he had, and 
that of a right awful kind) as complete a knight-errant as ever 
watched and prayed, ere putting on his spurs, in fantastic Gothic 
chapel, beneath " storied windows richly dight." Was there no 
poetry in him, either, half an hour afterwards, as he lay bleeding 
across the corpse of the gallant horse, waiting for his turn with 
the surgeon, and fumbled for the Bible in his boot, and tried to 
hum a psalm, and thought of Cousin Patience, and his father and 
his mother, and how they would hear, at least, that he had played 



PLAYS AND PURITANS. 117 

the man in Israel that day, and resisted unto blood, striving 
against sin and the Man of Sin ? 

And was there no poetry in him, too, as he came wearied 
along Thoresby dyke, in the quiet autumn eve, home to the 
house of his forefathers, and saw afar off the knot of tall poplars 
rising over the broad misty flat, and the one great abele tossing 
its sheets of silver in the dying gusts, and knew that they stood 
before his father's door? Who can tell all the pretty child- 
memories which flitted across his brain at that sight, and made 
him forget that he was a wounded cripple ? There is the dyke 
where he and his brothers snared the great pike which stole the 
ducklings — how many years ago ? while pretty little Patience 
stood by trembling, and shrieked at each snap of the brute's wide 
jaws ; and there — down that long dark lode, ruffling with crimson 
in the sunset breeze, he and his brother skated home in triumph 
with Patience when his uncle died. What a day that was ! 
when, in the clear, bright winter noon, they laid the gate upon 
the ice, and tied the beef-bones under the four corners, and 
packed little Patience on it. — How pretty she looked, though her 
eyes were red with weeping, as she peeped out from among the 
heap of blankets and horse-hides, and how merrily their long 
fen-runners whistled along the ice-lane, between the high banks 
of sighing reed, as they towed home their new treasure in triumph, 
at a pace like the race horse's, to the dear old home among the 
poplar-trees. And now he was going home to meet her, after 
a mighty victory, a deliverance from heaven, second only in his 
eyes to that Red-Sea one. Was there no poetry in his heart at 
that thought ? Did not the glowing sunset, and the reed-beds 
which it transfigured before him into sheets of golden flame, 
seem tokens that the glory of God was going before him in his 
path ? Did not the sweet clamour of the wild-fowl, gathering 
for one rich paean ere they sank into rest, seem to him as 
God's bells chiming him home in triumph, with peals sweeter 
and bolder than those of Lincoln or Peterborough steeple-house ? 
Did not the very lapwing, as she tumbled, softly wailing, before 
his path, as she did years ago, seem to welcome the wanderer 
home in the name of heaven ? 

Fair Patience, too, though she was a Puritan, yet did not her 
cheek flush, her eye grow dim, like any other girl's, as she saw 
far off the red-coat, like a sliding spark of fire, coming slowly 
along the strait fen-bank, and fled up stairs into her chamber to 
pray, half that it might be, half that it might not be, he ? Was 
there no happy storm of human tears and human laughter when 
he entered the court-yard gate ? Did not the old dog lick his 
Puritan hand as lovingly as if it had been a Cavalier's ? Did 



118 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

not lads and lasses run out shouting ? Did not the old yeoman 
father hug him, weep over him, hold him at arm's length, and 
hug him again, as heartily as any other John Bull, even though 
the next moment he called all to kneel down and thank Him who 
had sent his boy home again, after bestowing on him the grace 
to bind kings in chains and nobles with links of iron, and con- 
tend to death for the faith delivered to the saints ? And did not 
Zeal-for-Truth look about as wistfully for Patience as any other 
man would have done, longing to see her, yet not daring even to 
ask for her ? And when she came down at last, was she the 
less lovely in his eyes, because she came, not flaunting with bare 
bosom, in tawdry finery and paint, but shrouded close in coif 
and pinner, hiding from all the world beauty which was there 
still, but was meant for one alone, and that only if God willed, 
in God's good time ? And was there no faltering of their voices, 
no light in their eyes, no trembling pressure of their hands, which 
said more, and was more, ay, and more beautiful in the sight of 
Him who made them, than all Herrick's Dianemes, Waller's 
Sacharissas, flames, darts, posies, love-knots, anagrams, and the 
rest of the insincere cant of the court ? What if Zeal-for-Truth 
had never strung two rhymes together in his life ? Did not his 
heart go for inspiration to a loftier Helicon, when it w r hispered 
to itself, " My love, my dove, my undefiled is but one," than if 
he had filled pages with sonnets, about Venuses, and Cupids, 
love-sick shepherds and cruel nymphs ? 

And was there no poetry, true idyllic poetry, as of Longfellow's 
Evangeline itself, in that trip round the old farm next morning ; 
when Zeal-for-Truth, after looking over every heifer, and peep- 
ing into every stye, would needs canter down by his father's side 
to the horse-fen, with his arm in a sling ; while the partridges 
whirred up before them, and the lurchers flashed like gray snakes 
after the hare, and the colts came whinnying round with staring 
eyes and streaming manes, and the two chatted on in the same 
sober business-like English tone, alternately of " The Lord's 
great dealings," by General Cromwell, the pride of all honest 
fen-men, and the price of troop-horses at the next Horncastle 
fair ? 

Poetry in those old Puritans ? Why not ? They were men 
of like passions with ourselves. They loved, they married, they 
brought up children ; they feared, they sinned, they sorrowed, 
they fought — they conquered. There was poetry enough in 
them, be sure, though they acted it like men, instead of singing 
it like birds. 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. ng 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 

{North British Review. ] 

Four faces among the portraits of modern men, great or 
small, strike us as supremely beautiful ; not merely in expres- 
sion, but in the form and proportion and harmony of features : 
Shakspeare, Raffaelle, Goethe, Burns. One would expect it to 
be so ; for the mind makes the body, not the body the mind ; and 
the inward beauty seldom fails to express itself in the outward, 
as a visible sign of the invisible grace or disgrace of the wearer. 
Not that it is so always. A Paul, Apostle of the Gentiles, may 
be ordained to be " in presence weak, in speech contemptible," 
hampered by some thorn in the flesh — to interfere apparently 
with the success of his mission, perhaps for the same wise pur- 
pose of Providence which sent Socrates to the Athenians, the 
worshippers of physical beauty, in the ugliest of human bodies, 
that they, or rather those of them to whom eyes to see had been 
given, might learn that soul is after all independent of matter, 
and not its creature and its slave. But, in the generality of 
cases, physiognomy is a sound and faithful science, and tells us, 
if not, alas ! what the man might have been, still what he has 
become. Yet even this former problem, what he might have 
been, may often be solved for us by youthful portraits, before sin 
and sorrow and weakness have had their will upon the features ; 
and, therefore, when we spoke of these four beautiful faces, we 
alluded, in each case, to the earliest portraits of each genius which 
we could recollect. Placing them side by side, we must be 
allowed to demand for that of Robert Burns an honourable sta- 
tion among them. Of Shakspeare's we do not speak, for it 
seems to us to combine in itself the elements of all the other 
three ; but of the rest, we question whether Burns's be not, 
after all, if not the noblest, still the most lovable — the most like 

1. ElliotVs Potms. 2. Poems of Robert Nicoll. 3. Life and Poems of John 
Bethune. 4. Memoirs of Alexander Bethune. By W. M'Combie. 5. Rhymes 
and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver. By William Thom of Inverury. 
6. The Purgatory of Suicides. By Thomas Cooper. 7. The Book of Scottish 
Song. By Alexander Whitelaw. 



120 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

what we should wish that of a teacher of men to be. Raffaelle — 
the most striking portrait of him, perhaps, is the full-face pencil 
sketch by his own hand in the Taylor Gallery at Oxford — 
though without a taint of littleness or effeminacy, is soft, melan- 
choly, formed entirely to receive and to elaborate in silence. 
His is a face to be kissed, not worshipped. Goethe, even in 
his earliest portraits, looks as if his expression depended too 
much on his own will. There is a self-conscious power, and 
purpose, and self-restraint, and all but scorn, upon those glorious 
lineaments, which might win worship, and did, but not love, 
except as the child of enthusiasm or of relationship. But Burns's 
face, to judge of it by the early portrait of him by Nasmyth, 
must have been a face like that of Joseph of old, of whom the 
Rabbis relate, that he was literally mobbed by the Egyptian 
ladies whenever he walked the streets. The magic of that coun- 
tenance, making Burns at once tempter and tempted, may explain 
many a sad story. The features certainly are not as regular or 
well-proportioned as they might be ; there is no superabundance 
of the charm of mere animal health in the outline or colour ; 
but the marks of intellectual beauty in the face are of the highest 
order, capable of being but too triumphant among a people of 
deep thought and feeling. The lips, ripe, yet not coarse or loose, 
full of passion and the faculty of enjoyment, are parted, as if 
forced to speak, by the inner fulness of the heart, the features are 
rounded, rich, and tender, and yet the bones show thought mas- 
sively and manfully everywhere ; the eyes laugh out upon you 
with boundless good humour and sweetness, with simple, eager, 
gentle surprise — a gleam as of the morning star, looking forth 
upon the wonder of a new-born world — altogether 

" A station like the herald Mercur} 7 , 
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill. " 

Bestow on such a man the wittiest and most winning elo- 
quence — a rich flow of spirits and fulness of health and life— a 
deep sense of wonder and beauty in the earth and man — an in- 
stinct of the dynamic and supernatural laws which underlie and 
vivify this material universe and its appearances, healthy, yet 
irregular and unscientific, only not superstitious — turn him loose 
in any country in Europe, during the latter half of the eighteenth 
century, and it will not be difficult, alas ! to cast his horoscope. 

And what an age in which to be turned loose ! — for loose he 
must go, to solve the problem of existence for himself. The 
grand simple old Scottish education which he got from his par- 
ents must prove narrow and unsatisfying for so rich and mani- 
fold a character ; not because it was in itself imperfect ; not 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. ,* 121 

because it did not contain implicitly all things necessary for his 
" salvation " — in every sense, all laws which he might require 
for his after-life guidance ; but because it contained so much of 
them as yet only implicitly ; because it was not yet conscious of 
its own breadth and depth, and power of satisfying the new 
doubts and cravings of such minds and such times as Burns's. 
It may be that Burns was the devoted victim by whose fall it 
was to be taught that it must awaken and expand and renew its 
youth in shapes equally sound, but more complex and scientific. 
But it had not done so then. And when Burns found himself 
gradually growing beyond his father's teaching in one direction, 
and tempted beyond it in another and a lower one, what was 
there in those times to take up his education at the point where 
it had been left unfinished ? He saw around him in plenty 
animal good-nature and courage, barbaric honesty and hospital- 
ity — more, perhaps, than he would see now ; for the upward 
progress into civilized excellences is sure to be balanced by 
some loss of savage ones — but all reckless, shallow, above all, 
drunken. It was a hard-drinking, coarse, materialist age. The 
higher culture, of Scotland especially, was all but exclusively 
French — not a good kind, while Voltaire and Volney still re- 
mained unanswered, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses were ac- 
cepted by all young gentlemen, and a great many young ladies, 
who could read French, as the best account of the relation of the 
sexes. 

Besides, the philosophy of that day, like its criticism, was 
altogether mechanical, nay, as it now seems, materialist in its 
ultimate and logical results. Criticism was outward, and of the 
form merely. The world was not believed to be already, and in 
itself, mysterious and supernatural, and the poet was not defined 
as the man who could see and proclaim that supernatural ele- 
ment. Before it was admired, it was to be raised above nature 
into the region of " the picturesque," or what not ; and the poet 
was the man who gave it this factitious and superinduced beauty, 
by a certain " kompsologia " and " meteoroepeia," called " poetic 
diction," now happily becoming extinct, mainly, we believe, 
under the influence of Burns, although he himself thought it his 
duty to bedizen his verses therewith, and though it was destined 
to flourish for many a year more in the temple of the father of 
lies, like ajar of paper flowers on a Popish altar. 

No wonder that in such a time, a genius like Burns should 
receive not only no guidance, but no finer appreciation. True ; 
he was admired, petted, flattered ; for that the man was wonder- 
ful, no one could doubt. But we question whether he was 
understood ; whether, if that very flowery and magniloquent 
6 



122 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

style which we now consider his great failing had been away, 
he would not have been passed over by the many as a writer of 
vulgar doggrel. True, the old simple ballad-muse of Scotland 
still dropped a gem from her treasures, here and there, even in 
the eighteenth century itself — witness Aidd Robin Gray. But 
who suspected that they were gems, of which Scotland, fifty 
years afterwards, would be prouder and more greedy than of 
all the second-hand French culture which seemed to her then 
the highest earthly attainment ? The review of Burns in an 
early number of the Edinburgh Review, said to be from the 
pen of the late Lord Jeffrey, shows, as clearly as any thing can, 
the utterly inconsistent and bewildered feeling with which the 
w T orld must have regarded" such a phenomenon. Alas ! there 
was inconsistency and bewilderment enough in the phenomenon 
itself, but that only made confusion worse confounded ; the con- 
fusion was already there, even in the mind of the more practical 
literary men, who ought, one would have thought, also to have 
been the most deep-sighted. But no. The reviewer turns the 
strange thing over and over, and inside out — and some fifteen 
years after it has vanished out of the world, having said out its 
say and done all that [it had to ^do, he still finds it too utterly 
abnormal to make up his mind about in any clear or consistent 
way, and gets thoroughly cross with it, and calls it hard names, 
because it will not fit into any established pigeon-hole or drawer 
of the then existing anthropological museum. Burns is " a liter- 
ary prodigy," and yet it is " a derogation " to him to consider 
him as one. And that we find, not as we should have expected, 
because he possessed genius which would have made success a 
matter of course in any rank, but because he was so well edu- 
cated — " having acquired a competent knowledge of French, 
together with the elements of Latin and Geometry," and before 
he had composed a single stanza, was ' far more intimately 
acquainted with Pope, Shakspeare, and Thomson, than nine 
tenths of the youths who leave school for the University," &c, 
&c. ; — in short, because he was so well educated, that his becom- 
ing Robert Burns, the immortal poet, was a matter of course and 
necessity. And yet, a page or two on, the great reason why it 
was more easy for Robert Burns the cottar to become an original 
and vigorous poet, rather than for any one of " the herd of schol- 
ars and academical literati," who are depressed and discouraged 
by " perusing the most celebrated writers, and conversing with 
the most intelligent judges," is found to be, that " the literature 
and refinement of the age does not exist for a rustic and illiter- 
ate individual ; and consequently the present time is to him 
what the rude times of old were to the vigorous writers who 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 123 

adorned them." — In short, the great reason of Robert Burns's 
success was that he did not possess that education, the possession 
of which proves him to be no prodigy, though the review begins 
by calling him one, and coupling him with Stephen Duck and 
Thomas Dermody. 

Now if the best critic of the age, writing fifteen years after 
Burns's death, found himself between the horns of such a dilem- 
ma — which indeed, like those of an old Arnee bull, meet at the 
points, and form a complete circle of contradictions — what must 
have been the bewilderment of lesser folk during the prodigy's 
very lifetime ? what must, indeed, have been his own bewilder- 
ment at himself, however manfully he may have kept it down? 
No wonder that he was unguided, either by himself or by others. 
We do not blame them ; him we must deeply blame; yet not as 
we ought to blame ourselves, did we yield in the least to those 
temptations under which Burns fell. 

Biographies of Burns," and those good ones, according to the 
standard of biographies in these days, are said to exist ; we 
cannot say that we have as yet cared to read them. There are 
several other biographies, even more important, to be read first, 
w r hen they are written. Shakspeare has found as yet no biog- 
rapher ; has not even left behind him materials for a biography, 
such at least as are considered worth using. Indeed, w 7 e ques- 
tion whether such a biography would be of any use whatever to 
the world ; for the man who cannot, by studying his dramas in 
some tolerably accurate chronological order, and using as a run- 
ning accompaniment and closet commentary those awe-inspiring 
sonnets of his, attain to some clear notion of what sort of life 
William Shakspeare must have led, would not see him much 
the clearer for many folios of anecdote. For after all, the best 
biography of every sincere man is sure to be his own works ; 
here he has set down, " transferred as in a figure," all that has 
happened to him, inward or outward, or rather, all which has 
formed him, produced a permanent effect upon his mind and 
heart ; and knowing that, you know all you need know, and are 
content, being glad to escape the personality and gossip of names, 
and places, and of dates even, except in as far as they enable 
you to place one step of his mental growth before or after 
another. Of the honest man this holds true always ; and almost 
always of the dishonest man, the man of cant, affectation, hypoc- 
risy ; for even if he pretend in his novel or his poem to be what 
he is not, he still shows you thereby what he thinks he ought to 
have been, or at least what he thinks that the world thinks he 
ought to have been, and confesses to you, in the most naive and 
confidential way, like one who talks in his sleep, what learning 



124 . KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

he has or has not had ; what society he has or has not seen, and 
that in the very act of trying to prove the contrary. Nay, the 
smaller the man or woman, and the less worth deciphering his 
biography, the more surely will he show you, if you have eyes to 
see and time to look, what sort of people offended him twenty 
years ago ; what meanness he would have liked " to indulge in," 
if he had dared, when young, -and for what other meanness he 
relinquished it, as he grew up ; of what periodical he stood in 
awe when he took pen in hand, and so forth. Whether his books 
treat of love or political economy, theology or geology, it is there, 
the history of the man legibly printed, for those who care to read 
it. In these poems and letters of Burns, we apprehend, is to be 
found a truer history than any anecdote can supply, of the things 
which happened to himself, and moreover of the most notable 
things which went on in Scotland between 1759 and 1796. 

This latter assertion may seem startling, when we consider 
that we find in these poems no mention whatsoever of the dis- 
coveries of steamboats and spinning-jennies, the rise of the great 
manufacturing cities, the revolution in Scottish agriculture, or 
even in Scottish metaphysics. But after all, the history of a 
nation is the history of the men, and not of the things thereof; 
and the history of those men is the history of their hearts, and 
not of their purses, or even of their heads ; and the history of one 
man who has felt in himself the heart experiences of his genera- 
tion, and anticipated many belonging to the next generation, is so 
far the collective history of that generation, and of much — no 
man can say how much — of the next generation ; and such a 
man, bearing within his single soul a generation and a half of 
w r orking-men, we take Robert Burns to have been ; and his 
poems, as such, a contemporaneous. history of Scotland, the equal 
to which we are not likely to see written for this generation, or 
several to come. 

Such a man sent out into such an age, would naturally have a 
hard and a confused battle to fight, would probably, unless he fell 
under the guidance of some master mind, end se ipso mi?ior, 
stunted and sadly deformed, as Burns did. His works are after 
all only the disjecta membra poetce ; hints of a great might-have- 
been. Hints of the keenest and most dramatic appreciation of 
human action and thought. Hints of an unbounded fancy, play- 
ing gracefully in the excess of its strength, with the vastest 
images, as in that robe of the Scottish muse ; in which 

" Deep lights and shades, bold mingling, threw 
A lustre grand, 
And seem'd to my astonished view 

A well-known land." 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 125 

The image, and the next few stanzas which dilate it, might be 
a translation from Dante s Paradiso, so broad, terse, vivid, the 
painter's touch. — Hints, too, of a humour, which, like that of 
Shakspeare, rises at times by sheer depth of insight into the sub- 
lime ; as when 

" Hornie did the Laigh Kirk watch 
Just like a winking baudrons." — 

Hints of a power of verbal wit, which, had it been sharpened 
in such a perpetual word-battle as that amid which Shakspeare 
lived from the age of twenty, might have rivalled Shakspeare's 
own ; which even now asserts its force by a hundred little never- 
to-be-forgotten phrases scattered through his poems, which stick, 
like barbed arrows, in the memory of every reader. — And as for 
his tenderness, — the quality without which all other poetic excel- 
lence is barren, — it gushes forth toward every creature, animate 
and inanimate, with one exception, namely, the hypocrite, ever 
alike spiacente a Dio e ai nemici sui ; and therefore intolerable 
to Robert Burns's honesty, whether he be fighting for or against 
the cause of right. Again we say, there are evidences of a ver- 
satile and manifold faculty in this man, which, with a stronger 
will and a larger education, might have placed him as an equal 
by the side of those great names which we mentioned together 
with his at the commencement of this Article. 

But one thing Burns wanted ; and of that one thing his age 
helped to deprive him, — the education which comes by rever- 
ence. Looking round in such a time, with his keen power of 
insight, his keen sense of humour, what was there to worship ? 
Lord Jeffrey, or whosoever was the author of the review in the 
Edinburgh, says disparagingly, that Burns had as much educa- 
tion as Shakspeare. So he very probably had, if education 
mean book-learning. Nay, more, of the practical education of 
the fireside, the sober, industrious, God-fearing education, and 
"drawing out" of the manhood, by act and example, Burns may 
have had more under his good father than Shakspeare under 
his ; though the family life of the small English burgher in Eliza- 
beth's time would have generally presented, as we suspect, the 
very same aspect of staid manfulness and godliness which a 
Scotch farmer's did fifty years ago. But let that be as it may, 
Burns was not born into an Elizabethan age. He did not see 
around him Raleighs and Sidneys, Cecils and Hookers, Drakes 
and Frobishers, Spensers and Johnsons, Southamptons and Wil- 
loughbys, with an Elizabeth, guiding and moulding the great 
whole, a crowned Titaness, terrible, and strong, and wise, — a 
woman who, whether right or wrong, bowed the proudest, if not 
to love, yet still to obey. 



126 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

That was the secret of Shakspeare's power. Heroic himself, 
he was born into an age of heroes. You see it in his works. 
Not a play but gives patent evidence that to him all forms of 
human magnanimity were common and way-side flowers, — among 
the humours of men which he and Ben Jonson used to wander 
forth together to observe. And thus he could give living action 
and speech to the ancient noblenesses of Rome and the middle 
age ; for he had walked and conversed with them, unchanged in 
every thing but in the dress. Had he known Greek literature he 
could have recalled to imperishable life such men as Cimon and 
Miltiades, Leonidas and Themistocles, such deeds as Marathon 
and Salamis. For had we not had our own Miltiades, our own 
Salamis, written within a few years of his birth ; and were not 
the heroes of it still walking among men ? It was surely this 
continual presence of " men of worship," this atmosphere of admi- 
ration and respect and trust, in which Shakspeare must have 
lived, which tamed down the wild self-will of the deer-stealing 
fugitive from Stratford, into the calm large-eyed philosopher, 
tolerant and loving, and full of faith in a species made in the 
likeness of God. Not so with Burns. One feels painfully in 
his poems the want of great characters ; and still more painfully 
that he has not drawn them, simply because they were not there 
to draw. That he has a true eye for what is noble when he sees 
it, let his Lament for Glencairn testify, and the stanzas in his 
Vision, in which, with a high-bred grace which many a courtly 
poet of his day might have envied, he alludes to one and another 
Scottish worthy of his time. There is no vein of saucy and envi- 
ous "banausia" in the man ; even in his most graceless sneer, his 
fault — if fault it be — is, that he cannot and will not pretend to 
respect that which he knows to be unworthy of respect. He sees 
around him and above him, as well as below him, an average of 
men and things dishonest, sensual, ungodly, shallow, ridiculous 
by reason of their own lusts and passions, and he will not apply 
to the shams of dignity and worth, the words which were meant 
for their realities. After all, he does but say what every one 
round him was feeling and thinking : but he said it ; and hypo- 
critical respectability shrank shrieking from the mirror of her 
own inner heart. But it was all the worse for him. In the sins 
of others he saw an excuse for his own. Losing respect for and 
faith in his brother men, he lost, as a matter of course, respect 
for himself, faith in himself. The hypocrisy which persecutes in 
the name of law, whether political or moral, while in private it 
transgresses the very law which is for ever on its tongue, is turned 
by his passionate and sorely-tempted character into a too easy 
excuse for disbelieving in the obligation of any law whatsoever. 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 127 

He ceases to worship, and therefore to be himself worshipful, — 
and we know the rest. 

" He might have still worshipped God ? " He might, and 
surely amid all his sins, doubts, and confusions, the remembrance 
of the old faith learned at his parent's knee, does haunt him still 
as a beautiful regret, — and sometimes, in his bitterest hours, 
shine out before his poor broken heart as an everlasting Pharos, 
lighting him homewards after all. Whether he reached that 
home or not, none on earth can tell. But his writings show, if 
any thing can, that the vestal-fire of conscience still burned within, 
though choked again and again with bitter ashes and foul smoke. 
Consider the time in which he lived, when it was " as with the 
people, so with the priest," and the grand old life-tree of the 
Scottish Church, now green and vigorous with fresh leaves and 
flowers, was all crusted with foul scurf and moss, and seemed to 
have ceased growing, and to be crumbling down into decay ; con- 
sider the terrible contradiction between faith 'and practice which 
must have met the eyes of the man, before he could write with the 
same pen — and one as honestly as the other — The Cottar f s Satur- 
day Night and Holy Willie's Prayer. But those times are past, 
and the men who acted in them gone to another tribunal. Let 
the dead bury their dead ; and, in the mean time, instead of curs- 
ing the misguided genius, let us consider whether we have not 
also something for which to thank him ; whether, as competent 
judges of him aver from their own experience, those very seem- 
ing blasphemies of his have not produced more good than evil ; 
whether, though " a savour of death unto death," to conceited 
and rebellious spirits, they may not have helped to open the eyes 
of the wise to the extent to which the general eighteenth century 
rottenness had infected Scotland, and to make intolerable a state 
of things which ought to have been intolerable, even if Burns 
had never written. 

We are not attacking the reviewer, far less the Edinburgh 
Review, which some years after this not only made the amende 
honorable to Burns, but showed a frank impartiality only too 
rare in the reviews of these days, by publishing in its pages the 
noble article on Burns which has since appeared separately in 
Mr. Carlyle's Miscellanies ; what we want to show from the 
reviewer's own words, is the element in which Burns had to 
work, the judges before whom he had to plead, and the change 
which, as we think, very much by the influence cf his own 
poems, has passed upon the minds of men. How few are there 
who would pen now about him such a sentence as this — " He 
is," (that is, was, having gone to his account fifteen years before,) 
"perpetually making a parade of his own inflammability and 



128 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

imprudence, and talking with much self-complacency and exul- 
tation of the offence he has occasioned to the sober and correct 
part of mankind,"— -a very small part of mankind, one would 
have thought, in the British isles at least, about the end of the 
last century. But, it was the fashion then, as usual, to substitute 
the praise of virtues for the practice of them, and three-bottle 
and ten-tumbler men had a very good right, of course, to admire 
sobriety and correctness, and denounce any two-bottle and six- 
tumbler man who was not ashamed to confess in print the weak- 
nesses which they confessed only by word of mouth. Just, and 
yet not just. True, Burns does make a parade of his thought- 
lessness, and worse — but, why ? because he gloried in it ? He 
must be a very skin-deep critic who cannot see, even in the most 
insolent of those blameworthy utterances, an inward shame and 
self-reproach, which if any man had ever felt in himself, he 
would be in nowise inclined to laugh at it in others. Why, it is 
the very shame which wrings those poems out of him. They 
are the attempt of the strong man fettered to laugh at his own 
consciousness of slavery — to deny the existence of his chains — to 
pretend to himself that he likes them. To us, some of those 
wildest, " Rob the Ranter " bursts of blackguardism are most 
deeply mournful, hardly needing that the sympathies which they 
stir up should be heightened by the little scraps of prayer and 
bitter repentance, which lie up and down among their uglier 
brethren, the disjecta membra of a great " De Profundis," per- 
haps not all unheard. These latter pieces are most significant. 
The very doggrel of them, the total absence of any attempt at 
ornament in diction or polish in metre, is proof complete of their 
deep heart-wrung sincerity. They are like the wail of a lost 
child, rather than the remorse of a Titan. The heart of the 
man was so young to the last ; the boy-vein in him, as perhaps 
in all great poets, beating on through manhood for good and for 
evil. No ! there was parade there, as of the lost woman, who 
tries to hide her self-disgust by staring you out of countenance, 
but of complacency and exultation, none. 

On one point, namely, politics, Burns's higher sympathies seem 
to have been awakened. It had been better for him, in a worldly 
point of view, that they had not. In an intellectual, and even in 
a moral point of view, far worse. A fellow-feeling with the 
French Revolution, in the mind of a young man of that day, 
was a sign of moral health, which we should . have been sorry to 
miss in him. Unable to foresee the outcome of the great strug- 
gle, having lost faith in those everlasting truths, religious and 
political, which it was madly setting at nought, what could it 
appear to him but an awakening from the dead, a return to young 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 129 

and genial health, a purifying thunder-storm. Such was his 
dream, the dream of thousands more, and not so wrong a one 
after all. For that, since that fearful outburst of the nether pit, 
all Europe has arisen and awakened into manifold and beautiful 
new life, who can deny ? We are not what we were, but better ; 
or rather, with boundless means of being better if we will. We 
have entered a fresh era of time for good and evil ; the fact is 
patent in every sermon we hear, in every book we read, in every 
invention, even the most paltry, which we see registered. Shall 
we think hardly of the man who saw the dawn of our own day, 
and welcomed it cheerfully and hopefully, even though he fancied 
the mist-spectres to be elements of the true sunrise, and knew 
not — and who knows ? — the purposes of Him whose paths are in 
the great deep, and his ways past finding out ? At least, the 
greater part of his influence on the times which have followed 
him, is to be ascribed to that very " Radicalism " which in the 
eyes of the respectable around him, had sealed his doom, and 
consigned him to ignoble oblivion. It has been, with the working 
men who read him, a passport for the rest of his writings ; it 
has allured them to listen to him, when he spoke of high and 
holy things, which but for him, they might have long ago tossed 
away as worthless, in the recklessness of ignorance and discon- 
tent. They could trust his Cottars Saturday Night; they 
could believe that he spoke from his heart, when in deep anguish 
he cries to the God whom he had forgotten, while they would 
have turned with a distrustful sneer from the sermon of the sleek 
and comfortable minister, who in their eyes, however humbly 
born, had deserted his class, and gone over to the camp of the 
enemy, and the flesh-pots of Egypt. 

After the time of Burns, as was to be expected, Scottish song 
multiplies itself tenfold. The nation becomes awakened to the 
treasures of its own old literature, and attempts, what after all, 
alas ! is but a revival ; and like most revivals, not altogether a 
successful one. Of the twelve hundred songs contained in Mr. 
Whitelaw's excellent collection, whereof more than a hundred 
and fifty are either wholly or partly Burns's, the small proportion 
written before him are decidedly far superior in value to those 
written after him ; a discouraging fact, though not difficult to 
explain, if we consider the great social changes which have been 
proceeding, the sterner subjects of thought which have been 
arising, during the last half century. True song requires for its 
atmosphere a state rather of careless arcadian prosperity, than of 
struggle and doubt, of earnest looking forward to an unknown 
future, and pardonable regret for a dying past ; and in that state 
the mind of the masses, throughout North Britain, has been wel- 

6* 



130 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

tering confusedly for the last few years. The new and more 
complex era into which we are passing has not yet sufficiently 
opened itself to be sung about ; men hardly know what it is, 
much less what it will be ; and while they are hard at work 
creating it, they have no breath to spare in talking of it : one 
thing they do see and feel, painfully enough at times, namely, 
that the old Scottish pastoral life is passing away before the 
combined influence of manufactures and the large-farm system, 
to be replaced, doubtless, hereafter by something better, but in 
the meanwhile dragging down with it in its decay but too much 
that can ill be spared of that old society which inspired Ramsay 
and Burns. Hence the later Scottish song writers seldom really 
sing ; their proses want the unconscious lilt and flash of their 
old models ; they will hardly go (the true test of a song) without 
music — the true test, we say, of a song. Who needs music, 
however fitting and beautiful the accustomed air may happen to 
be, to Roy's Wife of Aldivalloch, or The Bride cam' out o* 
the Byre, or either of the casts of The Flowers of the Forest, 
or to Auld Lang Syne itself? They bubble right up out of 
the heart, and by virtue of their inner and unconscious melody, 
which all that is true to the heart has in it, shape themselves 
into a song, and are not shaped by any notes whatsoever. So 
with many, most indeed, of Burns's and a few of Allan Cunning- 
ham's ; the Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sail, for instance. But 
the great majority of these later songs seem, if the truth is to 
be spoken, inspirations at second hand, of people writing about 
things which they would like to feel, and which they ought to 
feel, because others used to feel them ia old times, but which 
they do not feel as their forefathers felt — a sort of poetical 
Tractarianism, in short. Their metre betrays them, as well as 
their words ; in both they are continually wandering, uncon- 
sciously to themselves, into the elegiac — except when on one sub- 
ject, whereon the muse of Scotia still warbles at first hand, and 
from the depths of her heart — namely, alas ! the Barley Bree ! 
and yet never, even on this beloved theme^ has she risen again 
to the height of Burns's bacchanalian songs. 

But when sober, there is a sadness about the Scottish muse 
now-a-days — as perhaps there ought to be — and the utterances 
of hers which ring the truest are laments. We question whether 
in all Mr. Whitelaw's collection there is a single modern poem, 
(placing Burns as the transition point between the old and new,) 
which rises so high, or pierces so deep, with all its pastoral 
simplicity, as Smibert's Widow's Lament. 

"Afore the Lammas tide 

Had dun'd the birken tree, 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 131 

In a' our water side, 

Nae wife was blest like me: 
A kind gudeman, and twa 

Sweet bairns were round me here; 
But they're a' ta'en awa' 

Sin' the fa' o' the year. 

" Sair trouble cam' our gate, 

And made me, when it cam', 
A bird without a mate, 

A ewe without a lamb. 
Our hay was yet to maw, 

And our corn was yet to shear ; 
When they a' dwined awa' 

In the fa' o' the year, 

" I daurna look a-field, 

For aye I trow to see, 
The form that was a bield 

To my wee bairns and me ; 
But wind, and weet, and snaw, 

They never mair can fear, 
Sin' they a' got the ca', 

In the fa' o' the year. 

" Aft on the hill at e'ens 

I see him 'mang the ferns, 
The lover o' my teens, 

The father o' my bairns: 
For there his plaid I saw, 

As gloamm' aye drew near — 
But my a's now awa', 

Sin' the fa' o' the year. 

u Our bonnie rigs theirsel', 

Reca' my waes to mind, 
Our puir dumb beasties tell 

0' a' that I ha'e tyned; 
For whae our wheat will saw, 

And whae our sheep will shear, 
Sin' my a' gaed awa', 

In the fa' o' the year? 

" My heart is growing cauld, 

And will be caulder still, 
And sair, sair in the fauld, 

Will be the winter's chill ; 
For peats were yet to ca', 

Our sheep they were to smear, 
When my a' dwined aw T a', 

In the fa' o' the year. 

" I ettle whiles to spin, 

But wee w 7 ee patterin' feet 
Come rinnin' out and in, 

And then I first maun greet: 
I ken its fancy a', 

And faster rows the tear, 
That my a' dw T ined awa' 

In the fa' o' the year. 



132 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

" Be kind, heav'n abune ! 

To ane sae wae and lane, 
An' tak' her hamewards sune, 

In pity o' her mane : 
Lang ere the March winds blaw, 

May she, far far frae here, 
Meet them a' that's awa', 

Sin' the fa' o' the year." 

It seems strange why the man who could write this, who shows, 
in the minor key of metre, which he has so skilfully chosen, such 
an instinct for the true music of words, could not have written 
much more. And yet, perhaps, we have ourselves given the 
reason already. There was not much more to sing about. The 
fashion of imitating old Jacobite songs is past, the mine now being 
exhausted, to the great comfort of sincerity and common sense. 
The peasantry, whose courtships, rich in animal health, yet not 
over pure or refined, Allan Ramsay sung a hundred years ago, 
are learning to think, and act, and emigrate, as well as to make 
love. The age of Theocritus and Bion has given place to — 
shall we say the age of the Caesars, or the irruption of the bar- 
barians ? — and the love-singers of the North are beginning to 
feel, that if that passion is to retain any longer its rightful place 
in their popular poetry, it must be spoken of henceforth in words 
as lofty and refined as those in which the most educated and the 
most gifted speak of, it. Hence, in the transition between the 
old animalism and the new spiritualism, a jumble of the two 
elements, not always felicitous ; attempts at ambitious descrip- 
tion, after Burns's worst manner ; at subjective sentiment, after 
the worst manner of the world in general ; and yet, all the while, 
a consciousness that there was something worth keeping in the 
simple objective style of the old school, without which the new 
thoughtfulness would be hollow, and barren, and windy; and so 
the two are patched together, " new cloth into an old garment, 
making the rent worse." Accordingly, they are universally 
troubled with the disease of epithets, these new songs. Ryan's 
exquisite Lass wi' the Bonny Blue Een, is utterly spoiled by 
two offences of this kind. 



and- 



" She'll steal out to meet her loved Donald again,' 
" The world'sjfa&e and vanishing scene; " 



as Allan Cunningham's still more exquisite Lass of Preston 
Mill, is by one subjective figure,— 

" Six hills are woolly with my sheep, 
Six vales are lowing with my kye." 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 133 

Burns doubtless committed the same fault again and again ; 
but in his time it was the fashion ; and the older models (for 
models they are and will remain for ever) had not been studied 
and analyzed as they have been since. Burns, indeed, actually 
spoiled one or two of his own songs by altering them from their 
first cast to suit the sentimental taste of his time. The first ver- 
sion, for instance, of the Banks and Braes o 9 Bonnie jDoo?i, is 
far superior to the second and more popular one, because it 
dares to go without epithets. Compare the second stanza of 
each : — 

" Thoul't break my heart, thou bonnie bird. 
That sings upon the bough ; 
Thou minds me o' the happy days 
When my fause love was true." 
* * * * * 

11 Thoul't break my heart, thou warbling bird, 
That wantons through the flowery thorn; 
Thou minds me o' departed joys, 
Departed never to return." 

"What is said in the latter stanza which has not been said in 
the former, and said more dramatically, more as the images 
would really present themselves to the speaker's mind ? It 
would be enough for him that the bird was bonnie, and singing ; 
and his very sorrow would lead him to analyze and describe as 
little as possible a thing which so painfully contrasted with his 
own feelings ; whether the thorn was flowery or not, would not 
have mattered to him, unless he had some distinct association 
with the thorn-flowers, in which case he would have brought out 
the image full and separate, and not merely thrown it in as a 
make-weight to " thorn ; " — and this is the great reason why 
epithets are, nine times out of ten, mistakes in song and ballad 
poetry, he never would have thought of " departed " before he 
thought of "joys." A very little consideration of the actual pro- 
cesses of thought in such a case, will show the truth of our obser- 
vation, and the instinctive wisdom of the older song- writers, in 
putting the epithet as often as possible after the noun, instead of 
before it, even at the expense of grammar. They are bad things 
at all times in song-poetry, these epithets ; and, accordingly, we 
find that the best German writers, like Uhland and Heine, get 
rid of them as much as possible, and succeed thereby, every 
word striking and ringing down with full force, no cushion of an 
epithet intruding between the reader's brain-anvil and the poet's 
hammer to break the blow. In Uhland's Three Burschen, 
if we recollect right, there are but two epithets, and those of the 
simplest descriptive kind — " Thy fair daughter " and a " black 
pall." Were there more, we question whether the poet would 



134 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

have succeeded, as he has done, in making our flesh creep as he 
leads us on from line to line and verse to verse. So Tennyson, 
the greatest of our living poets, eschews as much as possible, 
in his later writings, these same epithets, except in cases where 
they are themselves objective and pictorial — in short, the very 
things which he wants you to look at, as, for instance,- — 

"And into silver arrows break 
The sailing moon in creek and cove." 



This is fair enough ; but, indeed, after laying down our rule, we 
must confess that it is very difficult to keep always true to it, 
in a language which does not, like the Latin and German, allow 
us to put our adjectives very much where we choose. Never- 
theless, whether we can avoid it or not, every time we place 
before the noun an epithet which, like " departed joys," relates 
to our consciousnesses concerning the object, and not merely to 
the object itself; or an epithet, which, like "flowery thorn," 
gives us, before we get to the object itself, those accidents of the 
object which we only discern by a second look, by analysis and 
reflection ; (for the thorn, if in the flower, would look to us, at 
the first glance, not " flowery," but " white," " snowy," or what 
you will which expresses colour, and not scientific fact) — every 
time, we repeat, this is done, the poet descends from the objective 
and dramatic domain of song, into the subjective and reflective 
one of elegy. 

But the field in which Burns's influence has been, as was to 
be expected, most important and most widely felt, is in the poems 
of working men. He first proved that it was possible to become 
a poet and a cultivated man, without deserting his class, either 
in station or in sympathies ; nay, that the healthiest and noblest 
elements of a lowly born poet's mind might be, perhaps certainly 
must be, the very feelings and thoughts which he brought up 
with him from below, not those which he received from above, 
in the course of his artificial culture. From the example of 
Burns, therefore, many a working man, who would otherwise 
have " died and given no sign," has taken courage, and spoken 
out the thought within him, in verse or prose, not always wisely 
and well, but in all cases, as it seems to us, in the belief that he 
had a sort of divine right to speak and be heard, since Burns 
had broken down the artificial ice-wall of centuries, and asserted, 
by act as well as song, that " a man's a man for a' that." Almost 
every volume of working men's poetry which we have read, seems 
to reecho poor Mcoll's spirited, though somewhat overstrained 
address to the Scottish genius : — 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 135 

" This is the natal day of him, 

Who, born in want and poverty, 
Burst from his fetters, and arose, 
The freest of the free. 

" Arose to tell the watching earth 

What lowly men could feel and do, 
To show that mighty, heaven-like souls 
In cottage hamlets grew. 

" Burns ! thou hast given us a name 

To shield us from the taunts of scorn : 
The plant that creeps amid the soil 
A glorious flower has borne. 

"Before the proudest of the earth 
We stand with an uplifted brow 
Like us, thou wast a toil-worn man ; 
And we are noble now ! " 

The critic, looking calmly on, may indeed question whether this 
new fashion of verse-writing among working men has been always 
conducive to their own happiness. As for absolute success as 
poets, that was not to be expected of one in a hundred, so that 
we must not be disappointed if among the volumes of working 
men's poetry, of which we give a list at the head of our Article, 
only two should be found, on perusal, to contain any writing of a 
very high order, although these volumes form a very small por- 
tion of the verses which have been written, during the last forty 
years, by men engaged in the rudest and most monotonous toil. 
To every man so writing, the art, doubtless, is an ennobling one. 
The habit of expressing thought in verse not only indicates cul- 
ture, but is a culture in itself of a very high order. It teaches 
the writer to think tersely and definitely ; it evokes in him the 
humanizing sense of grace and melody, not merely by enticing 
him to study good models, but by the very act of composition. 
It gives him a vent for sorrows, doubts, and aspirations, which 
might otherwise fret and canker within, breeding, as they too 
often do in the utterly dumb English peasant, self-devouring 
meditation, dogged melancholy, and fierce fanaticism. And if 
the effect of verse-writing had stopped there, all had been well ; 
but bad models have had their effect as well as good ones, on the 
half-tutored taste of the working men, and engendered in them 
but too often a fondness for frothy magniloquence and ferocious 
raving, neither morally nor aesthetically profitable to themselves or 
their readers. There are excuses for the fault ; the young of all 
ranks naturally enough mistake noise for awfulness, and violence 
for strength ; and there is generally but too much, in the biogra- 
phies of these working poets, to explain, if not to excuse, a vein of 
bitterness, which they certainly did not le#rn from their master, 



136 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Burns. The two poets who have done them most harm, in teach- 
ing the evil trick of cursing and swearing, are Shelley and the 
Corn-Law Rhymer ; and one can well imagine how seducing two 
such models must be, to men struggling to utter their own com- 
plaints. Of Shelley this is not the place to speak. But of the 
Corn-Law Rhymer we may say here, that howsoever he may 
have been indebted to Burns's example for the notion of writing 
at all, he has profited very little by Burns's own poems. Instead 
of the genial loving tone of the great Scotchman, we find in 
Elliott a tone of deliberate savageness, all the more ugly, because 
evidently intentional. He tries to curse ; u he delights " — may 
we be forgiven if we misjudge the man — " in cursing ; " he makes 
a science of it ; he defiles, of malice prepense, the loveliest and 
sweetest thoughts and scenes (and he can be most sweet) by giv- 
ing some sudden, sickening revulsion to his reader's feelings ; 
and he does it generally with a power which makes it at once as 
painful to the calmer reader as alluring to those who are strug- 
gling with the same temptations as the poet. Now and then, his 
trick drags him down into sheer fustian and bombast ; but not 
always. There is a terrible Dantean vividness of imagination 
about him, perhaps unequalled in England, in his generation. 
His poems are like his countenance, coarse and ungoverned, yet 
with an intensity of eye, a rugged massiveness of feature, which 
would be grand but for the absence of love and of humour — love's 
twin and inseparable brother. Therefore it is, that although sin- 
gle passages may be found in his writings, of which Milton him- 
self need not have been ashamed, his efforts at dramatic poetry 
are utter failures, dark, monstrous, unrelieved by any really 
human vein of feeling or character. As in feature, so in mind, 
he has not even the delicate and graceful organization which 
made up in Milton for the want of tenderness, and so enabled 
him to write, if not a drama, yet still the sweetest of masques 
and idyls. 

Rather belonging to the same school than to that of Burns, 
though never degrading itself by Elliott's ferocity, is that extra- 
ordinary poem, The Purgatory of Suicides, by Thomas Cooper. 
As he is still in the prime of life, and capable of doing more and 
better than he yet has done, we will not comment on it as freely 
as we have on Elliott, except to regret a similar want of softness 
and sweetness, and also of a clearness and logical connection of 
thought, in which Elliott seldom fails, except when cursing. The 
imagination is hardly as vivid as Elliott's, though the fancy and 
invention, the polish of the style, and the indications of profound 
thought on all subjects within the poet's reach, are superior in 
every way to those of the Corn-Law Rhymer ; and when we 



BURNS AXD HIS SCHOOL. 137 

consider that the man who wrote it had to gather his huge store 
of classic and historic anecdote while earning his living, first as a 
shoemaker, and then as a TTesleyan country preacher, we can 
only praise and excuse, and hope that the day may come when 
talents of so high an order will find some healthier channel for 
their energies than that in which they now are flowing. 

Our readers may wonder at not- seeing the Ettrick Shepherd's 
poems among the list at the head of the Article. It seems to us, 
however, that we have done right in omitting them. Doubtless, 
he too was awakened into song by the example of Burns ; but 
he seems to us to owe little to his great predecessor, beyond the 
general consciousness that there was a virgin field of poetry in 
Scotch scenery, manners, and legends — a debt Avhich Walter 
Scott himself probably owed to the Ayrshire peasant just as 
much as Hogg did. Indeed, we perhaps are right in saying, that 
had Burns not lived, neither Wilson, Gait, Allan Cunningham, 
or the crowd of lesser writers who have found material for their 
fancy in Scotch peculiarities, would have written as they have. 
The first three names, AVilson's above all, must have been in any 
case distinguished ; yet it is surely no derogation to some of the 
most exquisite rural sketches in Christopher North's Recrea- 
tions, to claim them as the intellectual foster-children of The 
Cottar's Saturday Night. In this respect, certainly, the Ettrick 
Shepherd has a place in Burns's school, and, in our own opinion, 
one which has been very much overrated. But the deeper ele- 
ments of Burns's mind, those which have especially endeared 
him to the working man, reappear very little, or not at all, in 
Hogg. He left his class too much below him ; became too 
much of the mere aesthetic prodigy, and member of a literary 
clique ; frittered away his great talents in brilliant talk and 
insincere Jacobite songs, and, in fine, worked no deliverance on 
the earth. It is sad to have to say this, but we had it forced 
upon us painfully enough a few days ago, when re-reading Kil- 
meny. There may be beautiful passages in it ; but it is not 
coherent, not natural, not honest. It is throughout, an affecta- 
tion of the Manichgean sentimental-sublime, which God never yet 
put into the heart of any brawny, long-headed, practical Bor- 
derer, and which he therefore probably put into his own head, 
or, as we call it, affected, for the time being ; a method of poetry 
writing which comes forth out of nothing, and into nothing must 
return. 

This is unfortunate, perhaps, for the world ; for we question 
whether a man of talents in anywise to be compared with those 
of the Ettrick Shepherd has followed in the footsteps of Burns. 
Poor Tannahill, whose sad story is but too well known, perished 



138 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

early, at the age of thirty-six, leaving behind him a good many 
pretty love-songs of no great intrinsic value, if the specimens of 
them given in Mr. Whitelaw's collection are to be accepted as 
the best. Like all Burns's successors, including even "Walter 
Scott and Hogg, we have but to compare him with his original to 
see how altogether unrivalled oil his own ground the Ayrshire 
farmer was. In one feature only Tannahill's poems, and those 
later than him, except where pedantically archaist, like many of 
Motherwell's, are an improvement on Burns ; namely, in the 
more easy and complete interfusion of the two dialects, the Norse 
Scotch and the Romanesque English, which Allan Ramsay 
attempted in vain to unite ; while Burns, though not succeeding 
by any means perfectly, welded them together into something of 
continuity and harmony — thus doing for the language of his own 
country very much what Chaucer did for that of England. — A 
happy union, in the opinion of those who, as we do, look on the 
vernacular Norse Scotch as no barbaric dialect, but as an inde- 
pendent tongue, possessing a copiousness, melody, terseness, and 
picturesqueness which makes it both in prose and verse, a far 
better vehicle than the popular English for many forms of 
thought. 

Perhaps the young peasant who most expressly stands out as 
the pupil and successor of Burns, is Robert Nicoll. He is a les- 
ser poet, doubtless, than his master, and a lesser man, if the size 
and number of his capabilities be looked at ; but he is a greater 
man, in that, from the beginning to the end of his career, he seems 
to have kept that very wholeness of heart and head which poor 
Burns lost. Nicoll's story is, mutatis mutandis, that of the 
Bethunes, and many a noble young Scotsman more. Parents 
holding a farm between Perth and Dunkeld, they and theirs 
before them for generations inhabitants of the neighbourhood, 
" decent, honest, God-fearing people." The farm is lost by re- 
verses, and manfully Robert Nicoll's father becomes a day labour- 
er on the fields which he lately rented : and there begins, for the 
boy, from his earliest recollections, a life of steady sturdy drudgery. 
But they must have been grand old folk these parents, and in 
nowise addicted to wringing their hands over " the great might- 
have-been." Like true Scots Bible-lovers, they do believe in a 
God, and in a will of God, underlying, absolute, loving, and believe 
that the might-have-been ought not to have been simply because 
it has not been ; and so they put their shoulders to the new collar 
patiently, cheerfully, hopefully, and teach the boys to do the same. 
The mother especially, as so many great men's mothers do, stands 
out large and heroic, from the time when, the farm being gone, 
she, " the ardent book-woman," finds her time too precious to be 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 139 

spent in reading, and sets little Robert to read to her as she works — 
what a picture ! — to the last sad day, when, wanting money to come 
up to Leeds to see her dying darling, she " shore for the siller,'' 
rather than borrow it. And her son's life is like her own — the 
most pure, joyous, valiant little epic. Robert does not even take 
to work as something beyond himself, uninteresting and painful, 
which, however, must be done courageously : he lives in it, enjoys 
it as his proper element, one which is no more a burden and an 
exertion to him than the rush of the strid is to the trout who 
plays and feeds in it day and night, unconscious of the amount of 
muscular strength which he puts forth in merely keeping his 
place in the stream. Whether carrying Kenilworth in his plaid 
to the woods, to read while herding, or selling currants and 
whisky as the Perth storekeeper's apprentice, or keeping his lit- 
tle circulating library in Dundee, tormenting his pure heart with 
the thought of the twenty pounds which his mother has borrowed 
wherewith to start him, or editing the Leeds Times, or lying on 
his early death-bed, just as life seems to be opening clear and 
broad before him, he 

" Bates not a jot of heart or hope," 

but steers right onward, singing over his work, without bluster 
or self-gratulation, but for very joy at having work to do. There 
is a keen practical insight about him, rarely combined, in these 
days, with his single-minded determination to do good in his gen- 
eration. His eye is single, and his whole body full of light. 

" It would indeed," writes the grocer's boy, encouraging his despond- 
ent and somewhat Werterean friend, " be hangman's work to write 
articles one day to be forgotten to-morrow, if that were all ; but you 
forget the comfort — the repayment. If one prejudice is overthrown, 
one error rendered untenable ; if but one step in advance be the con- 
sequence of your articles and mine — the consequences of the labour 
of all true- men — are we not deeply repaid ? " 

Or again, in a right noble letter to his noble mother :-*-* 

" That money of R.'s hangs like a mill-stone about my neck. If I 
had paid it, I would never borrow again from mortal man. But do 
not mistake me, mother ; I am not one of those men who faint and 
falter in the great battle of life. God has given me too strong a heart 
for that. I look upon earth as a place where every man is set to 
straggle and to work, that he may be made humble and pure-hearted, 
and tit for that better land for which earth is a preparation — to which 
earth is the gate. . . . If men would but consider how little of real 
evil there is in all the ills of which they are so much afraid — poverty 
included — there would be more virtue and happiness, and less world 
and Mammon-worship on earth than is. I think, mother, that to me 



140 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

has been given talent ; and if so, that talent was given to make it 
useful to man/' 

And jet, there is a quiet self-respect about him withal : — 

" In my short course through life," says he in confidence to a friend 
at one-and-twenty, " I have never feared an enemy, or failed a friend ; 
and I live in the hope I never shall. For the rest, I have written my 
heart in my poems ; and rude and unfinished, and hasty as they are, it 
can be read there." 

" From seven years of age to this very hour, I have been dependent 
only on my own head and hands for every thing — for very bread. 
Long years ago — ay, even in childhood — adversity made me think, 
and feel, and suffer ; and would pride allow me, I could tell the world 
many a deep tragedy enacted in the heart of a poor . forgotten , un- 
cared-for boy But I thank God, that though I felt and suf- 
fered, the scathing blast neither blunted my perceptions of natural 
and moral beauty, nor, by withering the affections of my heart, made 
me a selfish man. Often when I look back I wonder how I bore the 
burden — how I did not end the evil day at once and for ever." 

Such is the man, in his normal state ; and as was to be ex- 
pected, God's blessing rests on him. Whatever he sets his hand 
to, succeeds. Within a few weeks of his taking the editorship of 
the Leeds Times, its circulation begins to rise rapidly, as was to 
be expected with an honest man to guide it. For Ni coil's polit- 
ical creed, though perhaps neither very deep nor wide, lies clear 
and single before him, as every thing else which he does. He 
believes naturally enough in ultra-Radicalism according to the 
fashions of the Reform Bill era. That is the right thing ; and 
for that he will work day and night, body and soul, and if needs 
be, die. There, in the editor's den at Leeds, he " begins to see 
the truth of what you told me about the w r orld's un worthiness ; 
but stop a little. I am not sad as yet .... If I am hindered 
from feeling the soul of poetry among woods and fields, I yet 
trust I am struggling for something worth prizing — something of 
which I am not ashamed, and need not be. If there be aught 
on earth worth aspiring to, it is the lot of him who is enabled to 
do something for his miserable and suffering fellow-men ; and 
this you and I wiil try to do at least." 

His friend is put to work a ministerial paper, with orders 
" not to be rash, but to elevate the population gradually ; " and 
finding those orders to imply a considerable leaning towards the 
By-ends, Lukewarm, and Facing-both-ways school, kicks over 
the traces, wisely, in Nicoll's eyes, and breaks loose. 

" Keep up your spirits," says honest Nicoll. " You are higher at 
this moment in my estimation, in your own, and that of every honest 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 141 

man, than you ever were before. Tait's advice was just such as I 
should have expected of him ; honest as honesty itself. You must 
never again accept a paper but where you can tell the whole truth 
without fear or favour. . . . Tell E. (the broken-loose editor's lady- 
love) from me to estimate as she ought, the nobility and determination 
of the man who has dared to act as you have done. Prudent men 
will say that you are hasty : but you have done right, whatever may 
be the consequences." 

This is the spirit of Robert Nicoll ; the spirit which is the 
fruit of early purity and self-restraint, of living " on bread and 
cheese and water/' that he may buy books ; of walking out to 
the Inch of Perth at four o'clock on summer mornings, to write 
and read in peace before he returns to the currants and the 
whisky. The nervous simplicity of the man comes out in the 
very nervous simplicity of the prose he writes ; and though there 
be nothing very new or elevated in it, or indeed in his poems 
themselves, we call on our readers to admire a phenomenon so 
rare, in the u upper classes " at least, in these days, and taking a 
lesson from the peasant's son, rejoice with us that " a man is born 
into the world." 

For Nicoll, as few do, practises what he preaches. It seems 
to him, once on a time, right and necessary that Sir William 
Molesworth should be returned for Leeds ; and Nicoll having so 
determined, " throws himself, body and soul, into the contest, 
with such ardour, that his wife afterwards said, and we can well 
believe it, that if Sir William had failed, Robert would have died 
on the instant ! " — why not ? Having once made up his mind 
that that was the just and right thing, the thing which was abso- 
lutely good for Leeds, and the human beings who lived in it, 
was it not a thing to die for, even if it had been but the election 
of a new beadle ? The advanced sentry is set to guard some 
obscure worthless dike-end — obscure and worthless in itself, 
but to him a centre of infinite duty. True, the fate of the 
camp does not depend on its being taken ; if the enemy round it, 
there are plenty behind to blow them out again. But that is no 
reason whatsoever why he, before any odds, should throw his 
musket over his shoulder, and retreat gracefully to the lines. 
He was set there to stand by that, whether dike-end or repre- 
sentation of Leeds ; that is the right thing for him ; and for that 
right he will fight, and if he be killed, die. So have all brave 
men felt, and so have all brave deeds been done, since man 
walked the earth. It is because that spirit, the spirit of faith, 
has died out among us, that so few brave deeds are done now, 
except on battle-fields, and in hovels whereof none but God and 
the angels know. 



142 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

So the man prospers. Several years of honourable and self- 
restraining love bring him a wife, beautiful, loving, worshipping 
his talents ; a help-meet for him, such as God will send at times 
to those whom he loves. Kind men meet and love and help 
him — " The Johnstones, Mr. Tait, William and Mary Howitt ; " 
Sir William Molesworth, hearing of his last illness, sends him, 
unsolicited, fifty pounds, which, as we understand it, Nicoll ac- 
cepts without foolish bluster about independence. Why not ? 
— man should help man, and be helped by him. Would he not 
have done as much for Sir William ? Nothing to us proves 
Nicoll's heart-wholeness more than the way in which he talks 
of his benefactors, in a tone of simple gratitude and affection, 
without fawning, and without vapouring. The man has too 
much self-respect to consider himself lowered by accepting a 
favour. 

But he must go after all. The editor's den at Leeds is not 
the place for lungs bred on Perthshire breezes ; and work rises 
before him, huger and heavier as he goes on, till he drops under 
the ever-increasing load. He will not believe it at first. In 
sweet childlike playful letters, he tells his mother that it is noth- 
ing. It has done him good—" opened the grave before his eyes, 
and taught him to think of death." " He trusts that he has not 
borne this, and suffered, and thought in vain." This too, he 
hopes, is to be a fresh lesson-page of experience for his work. 
Alas 1 a few months more of bitter suffering and of generous 
kindness, and love from all around him, — and it is over with him, 
at the age of twenty-three. Shall we regret him ? — shall we not 
rather believe that God knew best, and considering the unhealthy 
moral atmosphere of the press, and the strange confused ways 
into which old ultra-Radicalism, finding itself too narrow for the 
new problems of the day, has stumbled and floundered in the 
last fifteen years, believed that he might have been a worse man 
had he been a longer-lived one, and thank heaven that " the 
righteous is taken away from the evil to come ? " 

As it is, he ends as he began. The first poem in his book is 
" The Ha' Bible ; " and the last, written a few days before his 
death, is still the death-song of a man — without fear, without 
repining, without boasting, blessing and loving the earth which 
he leaves, yet with a clear joyful eye upwards and outwards and 
homewards. And so ends his little epic, as we called it. May 
Scotland see many such another ! 

The actual poetic value of his verses is not first-rate by any 
means. He is far inferior to Burns in range of subject, as .he is 
in humour and pathos. Indeed, there is very little of these latter 
qualities in him anywhere — rather playfulness, flashes of child- 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 143 

like fun, as in The Provost, and Bonnie Bessie Lee. But 
he has attained a mastery over English, a simplicity and quiet 
which Burns never did ; and also, we need not say, a moral 
purity. His " poems, illustrative of the Scotch peasantry," are 
charming throughout — alive and bright with touches of real 
humanity, and sympathy with characters apparently antipodal to 
his own. 

His more earnest poems are somewhat tainted with that car- 
dinal fault of his school, of which he steered so clear in prose — 
fine words ; yet he never, like the Corn-Law Rhymer, falls a curs- 
ing. He is evidently not a good hater even of "priests and 
kings, and aristocrats, and superstition ; " or perhaps he worked 
all that froth safely over and off in debating club-speeches and 
leading articles, and left us, in these poems, the genuine Meth- 
eglin of his inner heart, sweet, clear, and strong ; for there is 
no form of lovable or right thing which this man has come 
across, which he does not seem to have appreciated. Beside 
pure love and the beauties of nature, those on which every man 
of poetic power — and a great many of none, as a matter of 
course, have a word to say, he can feel for and with the drunken 
beggar, and the warriors of the ruined manor-house, and the 
monks of the abbey, and the old-mailed Normans with their 
" priest with cross and counted beads in the little Saxon chapel " 
— things which a radical editor might have been excused for 
passing by with a sneer. 

His verses to his wife are a delicious little glimpse of Eden ; 
and his People's Anthem rises into somewhat of true grandeur 
by virtue of simplicity :— 

" Lord, from thy blessed throne, 
Sorrow look down upon ! 

God save the Poor ! 
Teach them true liberty — 
Make them from tyrants free — 
Let their homes happy be ! 

God save the Poor ! 

" The arms of wicked men 
Do Thou with might restrain — 

God save the Poor! 
Raise Thou their lowliness — 
Succour Thou their distress — 
Thou whom the meanest bless ! 

God save the Poor ! 

" Give them stanch honesty — 
Let their pride manly be — 

God save the Poor ! 
Help them to hold the right ; 
Give them both truth and might, 
Lord of all Life and Light ! 

God save the Poor ! 



144 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

And so we leave Robert Nicoll, with the parting remark, that 
if the "poems illustrative of. the feelings of the intelligent and 
religious among the working-classes of Scotland " be fair samples 
of that which they profess to be, Scotland may thank God, that 
in spite of glen-clearings and temporary manufacturing rot-heaps, 
she is still whole at heart, and that the influence of her great 
peasant poet, though it may seem at first likely to be adverse to 
Christianity, has helped, as we have already hinted, to purify 
and not to taint; to destroy the fungus, but not to touch the heart 
of the grand old Covenant-kirk life-tree. 

Still sweeter, and, alas ! still sadder, is the story of the two 
Bethunes. If NicolPs life, as we have said, be a solitary melody, 
and short though triumphant strain of work-music, theirs is a 
harmony and true concert of fellow-joys, fellow-sorrows, fellow- 
drudgery, fellow-authorship, mutual throughout, lovely in their 
joint-life, and in their deaths not far divided. Alexander sur- 
vives his brother John only long enough to w T rite his Memoirs, 
and then follows ; and we have his story given us by Mr. 
M'Combie, in a simple unassuming little volume — not to be read 
without many thoughts, perhaps not rightly without tears. Mr. 
M'Combie has been wise enough not to attempt panegyric. He 
is all but prolix in details, filling up some half of his volume 
with letters of preternatural length, from Alexander to his pub- 
lishers and critics, and from the said publishers and critics to 
Alexander, altogether of an unromantic and business-like cast, 
but entirely successful in doing that which a book should do- 
namely, in showing the world that here was a man of like 
passions with ourselves, who bore from boyhood to the grave 
hunger, cold, wet, rags, brutalizing and health-destroying toil, 
and all the storms of the w r orld, the flesh, and the devil, and con- 
quered them every one. 

Alexander is set at fourteen to throw earth out of a ditch so 
deep, that it requires the full strength of a grown man, and loses 
flesh and health under the exertion ; he is twice blown up in 
quarrying with his own blast, and left for dead, recovers slowly, 
maimed and scarred, with the loss of an eye. John, when not 
thirteen, is set to stone-breaking on the roads during intense cold, 
and has to keep himself from being frost-bitten and heart-broken 
by monkey gambols ; takes to the weaving trade, and having 
helped his family by the most desperate economy to save £10 
wherewith to buy looms, begins to work them, with his brother 
as an apprentice, and finds the whole outlay rendered useless the 
very same year by the failures of 1825-6. So the two return 
to day-labour at fourteen pence a day. John in a struggle to do 
task-work, honestly over-exerts himself, and ruins his digestion 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 145 

for life. Next year he is set in November to clean out a water- 
course knee-deep in water, and then to take marl from a pit, and 
then to drain standing water off a swamp during an intense 
December frost, and finds himself laid down with a three months' 
cough, and all but sleepless illness, laying the foundation of the 
consumption which destroyed him. But they will not give in. 
Poetry they will write, and they write it to the best of their 
powers on scraps of paper, after the drudgery of the day, in a 
cabin pervious to every shower, teaching themselves the right 
spelling of the words from some Christian Remembrancer or 
other — apparently not our meek and unbiased contemporary of 
that name ; and all this without neglecting their work a day or 
even an hour, when the weather permitted — the " only thing 
which tempted them to fret," being — hear it readers and perpend! 
— " the being kept at home by rain and snow." Then an addi- 
tional malady (apparently some calculous one) comes on John, 
and stops by hi in for the six remaining years of his life. Yet 
between 1826 and 1832, John has saved £14 out of his misera- 
ble earnings, to be expended to the last farthing on his brother's 
recovery from the second quarry accident. Surely the devil is 
trying hard to spoil these men ! But no. They are made per- 
fect by sufferings. In the house with one long narrow room, and 
a small vacant space at the end of it, lighted by a single pane of 
glass, they write and write untiring, during the long summer 
evenings, poetry, Tales of the Scottish Peasant Life, which at 
last bring them in somewhat ; and a work on practical economy, 
which is bepraised and corrected by kind critics in Edinburgh, 
and at last published — without a sale. Perhaps one cause of its 
failure might be found in those very corrections. There were 
too many violent political allusions in it, complains their good 
Mentor of Edinburgh, and persuades them, seemingly the most 
meek and teachable of heroes, to omit them ; though Alexander, 
while submitting, pleads fairly enough for retaining them, in a 
passage which we will give, as a specimen of the sort of English 
possible to be acquired by a Scotch day-labourer, self-educated, 
all but the rudiments of reading and writing, and a few lectures 
on popular poetry from "a young student of Aberdeen," now 
the Rev. Mr. Adamson, who must look back on the friendship 
which he bore these two young men, as one of the noblest pages 
in his life. 

" Talk to the many of religion, and they will put on a long face, 
confess that it is a thing of the greatest importance to all — and go 
away and forget the whole. Talk to them of education : they will 
readily acknowledge that its ' a braw thing to be weel learned/ and 
begin a lamentation, which is only shorter than the lamentations of 
7 



146 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Jeremiah, because they cannot make it as long, on the ignorance of 
the age in which they live ; but they neither stir hand nor foot in the 
matter. But speak to them of politics, and their excited countenances 
and kindling eye show in a moment how deeply they are interested. 
Politics are therefore an important feature, and an almost indispen- 
sable element in such a work as mine. Had it consisted solely of 
exhortations to industry and rules of economy, it would have been 
dismissed with an ' Ou ay, its braw for him to crack that way ; but if 
he were whaur we are, deed he wad just hae to do as we do.' But 
by mixing up the science with politics, and giving it an occasional 
political impetus, a different result may be reasonably expected. In 
these days no man can be considered a patriot or friend of the poor, 
who is not also a politician." 

It is amusing, by the by, to see how the world changes its 
codes of respectability, and how, what is anathema one year, 
becomes trite in twenty more. The political sins in the work 
were, that " my brother had attacked the corn-laws with some 
severity ; and I have attempted to level a battery against that 
sort of servile homage which the poor pay to the rich ! " 

There is no use pursuing the story much further. They 
again save a little money, and need it ; for the estate on which 
they have lived from childhood changing hands, they are, with 
their aged father, expelled from the dear old dog-kennel, to find 
house-room where they can. Why not ? — " it was not in the 
bond." The house did not belong to them ; nothing of it, at 
least, which could be specified in any known lease. True, there 
may have been associations, but what associations can men be 
expected to cultivate on fourteen pence a day ? So they must 
forth, with their two aged parents, and build with their own 
hands a new house elsewhere, having saved some £30 from the 
sale of their writings. The house, as we understand, stands to 
this day — hereafter to become a sort of artisan's caaba and pil- 
grim's station, only second to Burns's grave. That, at least, it 
will become, whenever the meaning of the words " worth " and 
" worship " shall become rightly understood among us. 

For what are these men, if they are not heroes and saints ? 
not of the Popish sort, abject and effeminate, but of the true, 
human, evangelic sort, masculine and grand — like the figures in 
Raffaelle's Cartoons, compared with those of Fra Bartolomeo. 
Not from superstition, not from selfish prudence, but from devo- 
tion to their aged parents, and the righteous dread of dependence, 
they die voluntary celibates, although their writings show that 
they, too, could have loved as nobly as they did all other things. 
The extreme of endurance, self-restraint, of " conquest of the 
flesh," outward as well as inward, is the life-long lot of these 
men ; and they go through it. They have their share of in- 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 147 

justice, tyranny, disappointment ; one by one each bright boy's 
dream of success and renown is scourged out of their minds, and 
sternly and lovingly their Father in heaven teaches them the 
lesson of all lessons. By what hours of misery and blank de- 
spair that faith was purchased, we can only guess; the simple, 
strong men give us the result, but never dream of sitting down 
and analyzing the process for the world's amusement, or their 
own glorification. We question, indeed, whether they could 
have told us ; whether the mere fact of a man's being able to 
dissect himself, in public or in private, is not proof-patent that 
he is no man, but only a shell of a man, with works inside, which 
can of course be exhibited and taken to pieces — a rather more 
difficult matter with flesh and blood. If we believe that God is 
educating, the when, the where, and the how, are not only unim- 
portant, but, considering who is the teacher, unfathomable to us, 
and it is enough to be able to believe with John Bethune, that the 
Lord of all things is influencing us through all things ; whether 
sacraments, or sabbaths, or sun-gleams, or showers — all things 
are ours, for all are his, and we are his, and he is ours ; — and 
for the rest, to say with the same John Bethune : — 

" Oh, God of glory ! thou hast treasured up 

For me my little portion of distress ; 
But with each draught — in every bitter cup 

Thy hand hath mixed, to make its soreness less, 
Some cordial drop, for which thy name I bless, 
And offer up my mite of thankfulness. 

Thou hast chastised my frame with dire disease, 
Long, obdurate, and painful; and thy hand 

Hath wrung cold sweat -drops from my brow; for these 
I thank thee too. Though pangs at thy command 
Have compassed me about, still, with the blow, 
Patience sustained my soul amid its woe." 

Of the actual literary merit of these men's writings there is 
less to be said. However extraordinary, considering the circum- 
stances under which they were written, may be the polish and 
melody of John's verse, or the genuine spiritual health, deep 
death-and-devil-defying earnestness, and shrewd practical wis- 
dom, which shines through all that either brother writes, they 
do not possess any of that fertile originality, which alone would 
have enabled them, as it did Burns, to compete with the literary 
savans, who, though for the most part of inferior genius, have 
the help oi* information and appliances, from which they were 
shut out. Judging them, as the true critic, like the true moralist, 
is bound to do, u according to what they had, not according to 
what they had not," they are men who, with average advantages, 
might have been famous in their day. God thought it better for 
them to " hide them in his tabernacle from the strife of tongues/' 



148 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

— and, seldom believed truism, he knows best. Alexander shall 
not, according to his early dreams, " earn nine hundred pounds 
by writing a book, like Burns," even though his ideal method of 
spending be to buy all the boys in the parish " new shoes with 
iron tackets and heels," and send them home with shillings for 
their mothers, and feed their fathers on wheat bread and milk, 
with tea and bannocks for Sabbath-days, and build a house for 
the poor old toil-stiffened man whom he once saw draining the 
hill-field, " with a yard full of gooseberries, and an apple-tree ! " 
— not that, nor even, as the world judges, better than that, shall 
he be allowed to do. The poor, for whom he writes his Prac- 
tical Economy, shall not even care to read it ; and he shall go 
down to the grave a failure and a lost thing in the eyes of men : 
— but not in the eyes of grand God-fearing old Alison Christie, 
his mother, as he brings her, scrap by scrap, the proofs of their 
dead idol's poems, which she has prayed to be spared just to see 
once in print, and, when the last half-sheet is read, loses her sight 
for ever ; not in her eyes, nor in those of the God who saw him, 
in the cold winter mornings, wearing John's clothes, to warm 
them for the dying man before he got up. 

His grief at his brother's death is inconsolable. He feels for 
the first time in his life, what a lot his is, — for he feels for the 
first time that — 

. " Parent and friend and brother gone, 
I stand upon the earth alone." 

Four years he lingers ; friends begin to arise from one quarter 
and another, but he, not altogether wisely or well, refuses all 
pecuniary help. At last Mr. Hugh Miller recommends him to 
be editor of a projected u Non-Intrusion " paper in Dumfries, 
with a salary, to him boundless, of £100 a year. Too late ! The 
iron has entered too deeply into his soul ; in a few weeks more 
he is lying in his brother's grave, — " Lovely and pleasant in their 
lives, and in- their deaths not divided." 

"William Thorn of Inverury" is a poet altogether of the same 
school. His Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver 
are superior to those of either Nicoll or the Bethunes, the little 
love songs in the volume reminding us of Burns's best manner, 
and the two languages in which he writes being better amalga- 
mated, as it seems to us, than in any Scotch song wrtter. More- 
over, there is a terseness, strength, and grace about some oJ« these 
little songs, which would put to shame many a volume of vague 
and windy verse, which the press sees yearly sent forth by men, 
who, instead of working at the loom, have been pampered from 
their childhood with all the means and appliances of good taste and 



BUKNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 149 

classic cultivation. We have room only for one specimen of his 
verse, not the most highly finished, but of a beauty which can 
speak for itself. 

" DREAMINGS OF THE BEREAVED. 

" The morning breaks bonny o'er mountain and stream, 
An' troubles the hallowed breath of my dream. 
The gowd light of morning is sweet to the e'e, 
But ghost-gathering midnight, thou'rt dearer to me. 
The dull common world then sinks from my sight, 
And fairer creations arise to the night; 
When drowsy oppression has sleep-sealed my e'e, 
Then bright are the visions awakened to me ! 

" Ob, come, spirit-mother! discourse of the hours 
My young bosom beat all its beating to yours, 
When heart-woven wishes in soft counsel fell 
On ears — how unheedful, proved sorrow might tell ! 
That deathless affection nae sorrow could break ; 
When all else forsook me, ye would na forsake ; 
Then come, oh my mother ! come often to me, 
An' soon an' forever I'll come unto thee ! 

" An' then, shrouded loveliness ! soul-winning Jean, 
How cold was thy hand on my bosom yestreen! 
'Twas kind — for the love that your e'e kindled there 
Will burn, aye an' burn, till that breast beat nae mair — 
Our bairnies sleep round me, oh bless ye their sleep I 
Your ain dark eyed Willie will wauken an' weep ! 
But blythe through his weepin', he'll tell me how you, 
His heaven-hamed mammie, was dauting his brow". 

" Though dark be our dwellin', our happin' tho' bare, 
An' night closes round us in cauldness and care, 
Affection will warm us — and bright are the beams 
That halo our hame in yon dear land o' dreams : 
Then weel may I welcome the night's deathly reign, 
Wi' souls of the dearest I mingle me then ; 
The gowd light of morning is lightless to me, 
But, oh! for the night with its ghost revelrie! " 

But, even more interesting than the poems themselves, is the 
autobiographical account prefixed, with its vivid sketches of fac- 
tory life in Aberdeen, of the old regime of 1770, when "four 
days did the weaver's work, — Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, were 
of course jubilee. Lawn frills gorged (?) freely from under the 
wrists of his fine blue, gilt-buttoned coat. He dusted his head 
with white flour on Sunday, smirked and wore a cane ; walked 
in clean slippers on Monday ; Tuesday heard him talk war bra- 
vado, quote Volney, and get drunk : weaving commenced gradu- 
ally on Wednesday. Then were little children pirn-fillers, and 
such were taught to steal warily past the gate-keeper, concealing 
the bottle. These wee smugglers had a drop for their services, 
over and above their chances of profiting by the elegant and 



150 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

edifying discussions uttered in their hearing. Infidelity was 
then getting fashionable." But by the time Thom enters on 
his seventeen years' weaving, in 1814, the nemesis has come. 
" Wages are six shillings a week where they had been forty ; 
but the weaver of forty shillings, with money instead of wit, had 
bequeathed his vices to the weaver of six shillings, with wit 
instead of money." The introduction of machinery works evil 
rather than good, on account of the reckless way in which it is 
used, and the reckless material which it uses. " Vacancies in 
the factory daily made, were daily filled by male and female 
workers ; often queer enough people, and from all parts, — none 
too coarse for using. The pickpocket, trained to the loom six 
months in Bridewell, came forth a journeyman weaver, and his 
precious experiences were infused into the common moral pud- 
dle, and in due time did their work." No wonder that " the dis- 
tinctive character of all sunk away. Man became less manly — 
woman unlovely and rude." No wonder that the factory, like 
too many more, though a thriving concern to its owners, becomes 
" a prime nursery of vice and sorrow." " Virtue perished utterly 
withm its walls, and was dreamed of no more ; or, if remembered 
at all, only in a deep and woful sense of self-debasement — 
a struggling to forget, where it was hopeless to obtain" But to 
us, almost the most interesting passage in his book, and certainly 
the one which bears most directly on the general purpose of this 
article, is one in which he speaks of the effects of song on him- 
self and his fellow factory- workers. 

" Moore was doing all he could for love-sick boys and girls, yet they 
had never enough ! Nearer and dearer to hearts like ours was the 
Ettrick Shepherd, then, in his full tide of song and story; but nearer 
and dearer still than he, or any living songster, was our ill-fated fellow- 
craftsman, Tannahill. Poor weaver chiel ! what we owe to you ! — 
your Braes of Balquidder, and Yon Burnside, and Gloomy Winter, and 
the Minstrel's wailing ditty, and the noble Gleneiffer. Oh ! how they 
did ring above the rattle of a thousand shuttles ! Let me again pro- 
claim the debt which we owe to those song-spirits, as they walked in 
melody from loom to loom, ministering to the low-hearted ; and when 
the breast was filled with every thing but hope and happiness, let only 
break out the healthy and vigorous chorus, A man's a man for a' that, 
and the fagged weaver brightens up. . . . Who dare measure the re- 
straining influences of these very songs ? To us they were all instead 
of Sermons. Had one of us been bold enough to enter a church, 
he must have been ejected for the sake of decency. His forlorn and 
curiously patched habiliments would have contested the point of attrac- 
tion with the ordinary eloquence of that period. Church bells rang 
not for us. Poets were indeed our priests : but for those, the last relic 
of moral existence would have passed away. Song was the dew-drop 
which gathered during the long dark night of despondency, and was 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 151 

sure to glitter in the very first blink of the sun. You might have seen 
Auld Robin Gray wet the eyes that could be tearless amid cold and 
hunger, and weariness and pain. Surely, surely, then there was to that 
heart one passage left" 

Making all allowance for natural and pardonable high-colour- 
ing, we recommend this most weighty and significant passage to 
the attention of all readers, and draw an argumentum a fortiori, 
from the high estimation in which Thorn holds those very songs 
of Tannahill's, of which we just now spoke somewhat depreciat- 
ingly, for the extreme importance which we attach to popular 
poetry, as an agent of incalculable power in moulding the minds 
of nations. 

The popular poetry of Germany has held that great nation 
together, united and heart-whole for centuries, in spite of every 
disadvantage of internal division, and the bad influence of foreign 
taste ; and the greatest of their poets have not thought it be- 
neath them to add their contributions, and their very best, to 
the common treasure, meant not only for the luxurious and 
learned, but for the workman and the child at school. In Great 
Britain, on the contrary, the people have been left to form their 
own tastes, and choose their own modes of utterance, with great 
results, both for good and evil ; and there has sprung up before 
the new impulse which Burns gave to popular poetry, a consid- 
erable literature — considerable not only from its truth and real 
artistic merit, but far more so from its being addressed principally 
to the working-classes. Even more important is this people's liter- 
ature question in our eyes, than the more palpable factors of the 
education question, about which we now hear such ado. It does 
seem to us, that to take every possible precaution about the spirit- 
ual truth which children are taught in school, and then leave to 
chance the more impressive and abiding teaching which popular 
literature, songs especially, give them out of doors, is as great a 
niaiserie as that of the Tractarians who insisted on getting into 
the pulpit in their surplices, as a sign that the clergy only had 
the right of preaching to the people, while they forgot that, by 
means of a free press, (of the license of which they too were not 
slack to avail themselves,) every penny-a-liner was preaching to 
the people daily, and would do so, maugre their surplices, to the 
end of time. The man who makes the people's songs is a true popu- 
lar preacher. Whatsoever, true or false, he sends forth, will not 
be carried home, as a sermon often is, merely in heads, to be for- 
jgotten before the week is out : it will ring in the ears, and cling 
round the imagination, and follow the pupil to the workshop, and 
the tavern, and the fireside, even to the deathbed, such power is 
in the magic of rhyme. The emigrant, deep in Australian forests, 



152 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

may take down Chalmers's sermons on Sabbath evenings from 
the scanty shelf ; but the songs of Burns have been haunting his 
lips, and cheering his heart, and moulding him unconsciously to 
himself, in clearing and in pasture all the weary week. True, 
if he be what a Scotchman should be, more than one old Hebrew 
psalm has brought its message to him during these week-days ; 
but there are feelings of his nature on which those psalms, not 
from defect, but from their very purpose, do not touch ; how 
is he to express them, but in the songs which echo them ? 
These will keep alive, and intensify in him, and in the children 
who learn them from his lips, all which is like themselves. Is 
it, we ask again, to be left to chance what sort of songs these 
shall be ? 

As for poetry written for the working-classes by the upper, 
such attempts at it as we yet have seen, may be considered nil. 
The upper must learn to know more of the lower, and to make 
the lower know more of them — a frankness of which we honestly 
believe they will never have to repent. Moreover, they must 
read Burns a little more, and Cavaliers and Jacobites a little less. 
As it is, their efforts have been as yet exactly in that direction 
which would most safely secure the blessings of undisturbed 
obscurity. Whether " secular " or " spiritual," they have thought 
proper to adopt a certain Tommy-good-child tone, which, whether 
to Glasgow artisans or Dorsetshire labourers,- or indeed for any 
human being who is " grinding among the iron facts of life," is, 
to say the least, nauseous ; and the only use of their poematicula 
has been to demonstrate practically, the existence of a great and 
fearful gulf between those who have, and those who have not, in 
thought as well as in purse, which must be, in the former article 
at least, bridged over as soon as possible, if we are to remain one 
people much longer. The attempts at verse for children are 
somewhat more successful — a certain little Moral Songs, es- 
pecially, said to emanate from the Tractarian School, yet full of 
a health, spirit, and wild sweetness, which makes its authoress, 
in our eyes, " wiser than her teachers." But this is our way. 
We are too apt to be afraid of the men, and take to the children 
as our pis ailer, covering our despair of dealing with the major- 
ity, the adult population, in a pompous display of machinery for 
influencing that very small fraction, the children. " Oh, but the 
destinies of the empire depend on the rising generation ! " Who 
has told us so ? — how do we know that they do not depend on 
the risen generation ? Who are likely to do more work during 
our lifetime, for good and evil, — those who are now between 
fifteen and five-and-forty, or those who are between iiye and 
fifteen ? Yet for those former, the many, and the working, and 



BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL. 153 

the powerful, all we seem to be inclined to do is to parody Scrip- 
ture, and say, " He that is unjust, let him be unjust still ; and he 
that is filthy, let him be filthy still." 

Not that we ask any one to sit down, and, out of mere benev- 
olence, to write songs for the people. Wooden, out of a wooden 
birthplace, would such go forth, to feed fires, not spirits. But 
if any man shall read these pages, to whom God has given a 
truly poetic temperament, a gallant heart, a melodious ear, a 
quick and sympathetic eye for all forms of human joy, and 
sorrow, and humour, and grandeur, — an insight which can dis- 
cern the outlines of the butterfly when clothed in the roughest and 
most rugged chrysalis-hide ; if the teachers of his heart and pur- 
poses, and not merely of his taste and sentiments, have been the 
great songs of his own and of every land and age ; if he can see 
in the divine poetry of David and Solomon, of Isaiah and Jere- 
miah, and, above all, in the parables of Him who spake as never 
man spake, the models and elemental laws of a people's poetry, 
alike according to the will of God and the heart of man ; if he 
can welcome gallantly and hopefully the future, and yet know 
that it must be, unless it would be a monster and a machine, the 
loving and obedient child of the past ; if he can speak of the 
subjects which alone will interest the many, on love, marriage, 
the sorrows of the poor, their hopes, political and social, their 
wrongs, as well as their sins and duties ; and that with a fervour 
and passion akin to the spirit of Burns and Elliott, yet with more 
calm, more purity, more wisdom, and therefore with more hope, 
as one who stands upon a vantage-ground of education and 
culture, sympathizing none the less with those who struggle be- 
hind him in the valley of the shadow of death, yet seeing from 
the mountain-peaks the coming dawn, invisible as yet to them. 
Then let that man think it no fall, but rather a noble rise, to 
shun the barren glacier ranges of pure art, for the fertile gar- 
dens of practical and popular song, and write for the many, and 
with the many, in words such as they can understand, remem- 
bering that that which is simplest is always deepest, that the 
many contain in themselves the few, and that when he speaks 
to the wanderer and the drudge, he speaks to the elemental 
and primeval man, and in him speaks to all who have risen out 
of him. Let him try, undiscouraged by inevitable failures ; 
and if at last he succeeds in giving vent to one song which will 
cheer hard worn hearts at the loom and the forge, or wake one 
pauper's heart with the hope that his children are destined not 
to die as he died, or recall, amid Canadian forests or Australian 
sheep-walks, one thrill of love for the old country, and her lib- 
erties, and her laws, and her religion, to the settler's heart $ — 
7* 



154 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

let that man know that he has earned a higher place among the 
spirits of the wise and good, by doing, in spite of the unpleasant- 
ness of self-denial, the duty which lay nearest him, than if he 
had outrivalled Goethe on his own classic ground, and made 
all the cultivated and the comfortable of the earth desert, for 
the exquisite creations of his fancy, Faust, and Tasso, and 
Iphigenie. 



HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 155 



HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 

[Fraser's Magazine.] 

Few readers of this magazine probably know any thing about 
" Mystics ; " know even what the term means ; but as it is plainly 
connected with the adjective "mystical," they probably suppose 
it to denote some sort of vague, dreamy, sentimental, and there- 
fore useless and undesirable, personage. Nor can we blame 
them if they do so ; for mysticism is a form of thought and feel- 
ing now all but extinct in England. There are probably not ten 
thorough mystics among all our millions ; the mystic philosophers 
are very little read by our scholars, and read not for but in spite 
of their mysticism ; and our popular theology has so completely 
rid itself of any mystic elements, that our divines look with utter 
disfavour upon it, use the word always as a term of opprobrium, 
and interpret the mystic expressions in our liturgy — which mostly 
occur in the Collects — according to the philosophy of Locke, 
really ignorant, it would seem, that they were written by Plato- 
nist mystics. 

We do not blame them, either, save in as far as teachers of 
men are blameworthy for being ignorant of any form of thought 
which has ever had a living hold upon good and earnest men, 
and may therefore take hold of them again. But the English 
are not a mystic people, any more than the old Romans were ; 
their habit of mincl, their destiny in the world, are like those of 
the Romans, altogether practical ; and who can be surprised if 
they do not think about what they are not called upon to think 
about ? 

Nevertheless, it is quite a mistake to suppose that mysticism is 
by its own nature unpractical. The greatest and most prosper- 
ous races of antiquity — the Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindoos, 
Greeks — had the mystic element as strong and living in them as 
the Germans have now ; and certainly we cannot call them 

Hours ivith the Mystics. By Kobert Alfred Vaughan, B. A, 



156 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

unpractical peoples. They fell and came to ruin — as the Ger- 
mans seem but too likely to do — when their mysticism became 
unpractical: but their thought remained, to be translated into 
practice by sounder-hearted races than themselves. Rome learnt 
from Greece, and did, in some confused imperfect way, that 
which Greece only dreamed ; just as future nations may act here- 
after, nobly and usefully, on the truths which Germans discover, 
only to put in a book and smoke over. For they are terribly 
practical people, these mystics, quiet students and devotees as they 
may seem. They go, or seem to go, down to the roots of things, 
in a way; and lay foundations on which — be they sound or 
unsound — those who come after them cannot choose but build, as 
we are building now. For our forefathers were mystics for gen- 
erations ; they were mystics in the forests of Germany and in the 
dales of Norway ; they were mystics in the convents and the 
universities of the middle ages ; they were mystics, all the deep- 
est and noblest minds of them, during the Elizabethan era. 

Even now the few mystic writers of this island are exercising 
more influence on thought than any other men, for good or for 
evil. Coleridge and Alexander Knox have changed the minds, 
and with them the acts, of thousands ; and when they are 
accused of having originated, unknowingly, the whole " Tracta- 
rian " movement, those who have watched English thought care- 
fully, can only answer, that on the confession of the elder 
Tractarians themselves, the allegation is true : but that they 
originated a dozen other " movements " beside in the most oppo- 
site directions, and that free-thinking Emersonians will be as 
ready as Romish perverts and good plain English churchmen to 
confess that the critical point of their life was determined by the 
writings of the fakeer of Highgate. At this very time, too, the 
only real mystic of any genius who is writing and teaching is 
exercising more practical influence, infusing more vigorous life 
into the minds of thousands of men and women, than all the other 
teachers of England put together ; and has set roiling a ball 
which may in the next half century gather into an avalanche, 
perhaps utterly different in form, material, and direction, from all 
which he expects. 

So much for mystics being unpractical. If we look faith- 
fully into the meaning of t^eir name, we shall see why, for good 
or for evil, they cannot be unpractical ; why they, let them be the 
most self-absorbed of recluses, are the very men who sow the 
seeds of great schools, great national and political movements, 
even great religions. 

A mystic — according to the Greek etymology — should signify 
one who is initiated into mysteries : one whose eyes are opened 



HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 157 

to see things which other people cannot see. And the true mys- 
tic, in all ages and countries, has believed that this was the case 
with him. He believes that there is an invisible w r orld as well 
as a visible one — so do most men ; but the mystic believes also 
that this same invisible world is not merely a supernumerary one 
world more, over and above the earth on which he lives, and the 
stars over his head, but that it is the cause of them and the 
ground of them ; that it was the cause of them at first, and is 
the cause of them now, even to the budding of every flower, and 
the falling of every pebble to the ground ; and therefore, that 
having been before this visible world, it will be after it, and 
endure just as real, living, and eternal, though matter were anni- 
hilated to-morrow. 

" But, on this showing, every Christian, nay, every religious 
an, is a mystic; for he believes in an invisible world?" The» 
answer is found in the plain fact, that good Christians here in 
England do not think so themselves ; that they dislike and dread 
mysticism, would not understand it if it were preached to them ; 
are more puzzled by those utterances of St. John, wmich mystics 
have always claimed as justifying their theories, than by any part 
of their bibles. There is a positive and conscious difference 
between popular metaphysics and mysticism ; and it seems to lie 
in this : the invisible world in which Englishmen in general 
believe, is one which happens to be invisible now, but will not be 
so hereafter. When they speak of the other world, they mean a 
place which their bodily eyes will see some day, and could see 
now T if they were allowed ; when they speak of spirits, they 
mean ghosts who could, and perhaps do, make themselves visible 
to men's bodily eyes. We are not inquiring here whether they 
be right or wrong ; we are only specifying a common form of 
human thought. 

The mystic, on the other hand, believes that the invisible 
world is so by its very nature, and must be so for ever. He lives 
therein now, he holds, and will live in it through eternity : but 
he will see it never with any bodily eyes, not even with the eyes 
of any future " glorified " body. It is ipso facto not to be seen, 
only to be believed in ; never for him will " faith be changed for 
sight," as the popular theologians say that it will ; for this invisi- 
ble w r orld is only to be u spiritually discerned." 

This is the mystic idea, pure and simple ; of course there are 
various grades of it, as there are of the popular one, for no man 
holds his own creed and nothing more ; and it is good for him, in 
this piecemeal and shortsighted world, that he should not. Were 
he over-true to his own idea, he would become a fanatic, perhaps 
a madman. And so the modern evangelical of the Venn and 



158 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Newton school, to whom mysticism is a pet neology and nehush- 
tan, w T hen he speaks of u spiritual experiences," uses the adjective 
in its purely mystic sense ; while Bernard of Cluny, in his once 
famous hymn, Hie breve vivitur, mingles the two conceptions of 
the unseen world in inextricable confusion. Between these two 
extreme poles, in fact, we have every variety of thought, and it 
is good for us that we should have them ; for no one man or 
school of men can grasp the whole truth, and every intermediate 
modification supplies some link in the great cycle of facts which 
its neighbours have overlooked. 

In the minds who have held this belief, that the unseen world 
is the only real and eternal one, there has generally existed a 
belief, more or less confused, that the visible world is in some 
mysterious way a pattern or symbol of the invisible one ; that its 
physical laws are the analogues of the spiritual laws of the eter- 
nal world : a belief of which Mr. Yaughan seems to think lightly ; 
though if it be untrue we can hardly see how that metaphoric 
illustration in which he indulges so freely, and which he often 
uses in a masterly and graceful way, can be anything but useless 
trifling. For what is a metaphor or a simile but a mere paralo- 
gism — having nothing to do with the matter in hand, and not to 
be allowed for a moment to influence the reader's judgment, 
unless there be some real and objective analogy — homology we 
should call it — between the physical phenomenon from which the 
symbol is taken, and the spiritual truth which it is meant to 
illustrate ? What divineness, what logical weight, in our Lord's 
parables, unless he was by them trying to show his hearers that 
the laws which they saw at work in the lilies of the field, in the 
most common occupations of men, were but lower manifestations 
of the laws by which are governed the inmost workings of the 
human spirit ? What triflers, on any other ground, were Socrates 
and Plato. What triflers, too, Shakspeare and Spenser. Indeed, 
we should say that it is the beliefj conscious or unconscious, of 
the eternal correlation of the physical and spiritual worlds which 
alone constitutes the essence of a poet. 

Of course this idea led, and would necessarily lead, to follies 
and fancies enough, as long as the phenomena of nature 
were not carefully studied, and her laws scientifically inves- 
tigated ; and all the dreams of Paracelsus or Van Helmont, 
Cardan or Crollius, Baptista Porta or Behmen, are but the nat- 
ural and pardonable errors of minds which, while they felt deeply 
the sanctity and mystery of nature, had no Baconian philosophy 
to tell them what nature actually was, and what she actually 
said. But their idea lives still, and will live as long as the belief 
in a one God lives. The physical and spiritual worlds cannot be 



HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 159 

separated by an impassable gulf. They must, in some way or 
other, reflect each other, even in their minutest phenomena, for 
so only can they both reflect that absolute primaeval Unity in 
whom they both live and move and have their being. Mr. 
Vaughan's object, however, has not been to work out in his book 
such problems as these. Had he done so, he would have made 
his readers understand better what mysticism is ; he would have 
avoided several hasty epithets, by the use of which he has, we 
think, deceived himself into the notion that he has settled a mat- 
ter by calling it a hard name ; he would have explained, per- 
haps, to himself and to us, many strange and seemingly contra- 
dictory facts in the annals of mysticism. But he would also not 
have written so readable a book. On the whole he has taken 
the right course, though one wishes that he had carried it out 
more methodically. 

A few friends, literate and comfortable men, and right-hearted 
Christians withal, meet together to talk over these same mystics, 
and to read papers and extracts which will give a general notion 
of the subject from the earliest historic times. The gentlemen 
talk about and about a little too much ; they are a little too fond 
of illustrations of the popular pulpit style ; they are often apt to 
say each his say, with very little care of what the previous 
speaker has uttered ; in fact, these conversations are, as conver- 
sations, not good, but as centres of thought they are excellent. 
There is not a page nor a paragraph in which there is not some- 
thing well worth recollecting, and often reflections very wise and 
weighty indeed, w T hich show that, whether or not Mr. Vaughan 
has thoroughly grasped the subject of mysticism, he has grasped 
and made part of his own mind and heart many things far more 
practically important than mysticism, or any other form of 
thought ; and no one ought to rise up from the perusal of his 
book, without finding himself, if not a better, at least a more 
thoughtful man, and perhaps a humbler one also, as he learns 
how many more struggles and doubts, discoveries, sorrows and 
joys, the human race has passed through than are contained in 
his own private experience. 

The true value of the book is, that though not exhaustive of 
the subject, it is suggestive. It affords the best, indeed the only 
general, sketch of the subject which we have in England, and 
gives therein boundless food for future thought and reading ; and 
the country parson, or the thoughtful professional man who has 
no time to follow out the question for himself, much less to hunt 
out and examine original documents, may learn from these pages 
a thousand curious and interesting hints about men of like pas- 
sions with himself, and about old times, the history of which — 



160 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

as of all times — was not the history of their kings and queens, but 
of the creeds and deeds of the " masses " who worked, and failed, 
and sorrowed, and rejoiced again, unknown to fame. While 
whatsoever their own conclusions may be on the subject-matter 
of the book, they will hardly fail to admire the extraordinary 
variety and fulness of Mr. Vaughan's reading, and wonder when 
they hear — unless we are wrongly informed — that he is quite a 
young man, 

How one small head could compass all he knew. 

He begins with the mysticism of the Hindoo Yogis. And to 
this, as we shall hereafter show, he hardly does justice ; but we 
wish now to point out in detail the extended range of subjects, of 
each of which the book gives some general notion. From the 
Hindoos he passes to Philo and the neo-Platonists : from them 
to the pseudo-Dionysius, and the mysticism of the early Eastern 
Church. He then traces, shrewdly enough, the influence of the 
pseudo-Areopagite and the Easterns on the bolder and more 
practical minds of the Western Latins, and gives a sketch of 
Bernard and his Abbey of Clairvaux, which brings pleasantly 
enough before us the ways and works of a long-dead world, 
which was all but inconceivable to us till Mr. Carlyle disinterred 
it in his picture of Abbot Sampson, the hero of Past and Present. 

We are next introduced to the mystic schoolmen — Hugo, and 
Richard of St. Victor ; and then to a far more interesting class 
of men, and one with which Mr. Vaugh an has more sympathy 
than with any of his characters, perhaps because he knows more 
about them. His chapters on the German mysticism of the 
fourteenth century ; his imaginary, yet fruitful chronicle of 
Adolf of Arnstein, with its glimpses of Meister Eckart, Suso, 
the " Nameless Wild," Ruysbroek, and Tauler himself, are admi- 
rable, if merely as historic studies, and should be, and we doubt 
not will be, read by many as practical commentaries on the 
Theoiogia Germanica, and on the selection from Tauler's Ser- 
mons, now in course of publication. Had all the book been 
written as these chapters are, we should not have had a word of 
complaint to make, save when we find the author passing over 
without a word of comment, utterances which, right or wrong, 
contain the very key-note and central idea of the men whom he 
is holding up to admiration, and as we think, of mysticism itself. 
There is, for instance, a paragraph attributed to Ruysbroek, in 
p. 275, vol. i., which, whether true or false — and we believe it 
to be essentially true — is so inexpressibly important, both in the 
subject which it treats, and in the way in which it treats it, that 



HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 161 

twenty pages of comment on it would not have been ruisdevoted. 
Yet it is passed by without a word. 

Going forward to the age of the Reformation, the book then 
gives us a spirited glimpse of John Bokelson and the Monster 
Anabaptists, of Carlstadt and the Zurichian prophets, and then 
dwells at some length on the attempt of that day, to combine 
physical and spiritual science in occult philosophy. We have 
enough to make us wish to hear more of Cornelius Agrippa, 
Paracelsus, and Behmen, with their alchemy, " true magic," 
doctrines of sympathies,* signatures of things, cabbala, and 
Gamahea. and the rest of that (now fallen) inverted pyramid of 
pseudo-science. His estimate of Behmen and his writings, we 
may observe in passing, is both sound and charitable, and speaks 
as much for Mr. Taughan's heart as for his head. Then we 
have a little about the Eosicrucians and the Corate de Gahalis, 
and the theory of the Rabbis, from whom the Eosicrucians bor- 
rowed so much, all told in the same lively manner, all utterly 
new to ninety-nine readers out of a hundred, all indicating, we 
are bound to say, a much more extensive reading than appears 
on the page itself. 

From these he passes to the mysticism of the counter-Refor- 
mation, especially to the two great Spanish mystics, St. Theresa 
and St. John of the Cross. Here again he is new and interest- 
ing; but we must regret that he has not been as merciful to 
Theresa as he has to poor little John. 

He then devotes some eighty pages — and very well employed 
they are — in detailing the strange and sad story of Madame 
Guyon. and the ; * Quietest " movement at Louis Quatorze's court. 
Much of this he has taken, with all due acknowledgment, from 
Upham ; but he has told the story most pleasantly, in his own 
way. and these pages will give a better notion of Fenelon, and of 
the " Eagle" (for eagle, read vulture) " of Meaux," old Bossuet, 
than they are likely to find elsewhere in the same compass. 

Following chronological order as nearly as he can, he next 
passes to George Fox and the early Quakers, introducing a 
curious — and in our own case quite novel — little episode con- 
cerning The History of Hai Ehi Yokkdan, a mediaeval Arabian 
romance, which old Barclay seems to have got hold of and 
pressed into the service of his sect, taking it for literal truth. 

The twelfth book is devoted to Swedenborg, and a very valu- 

* Why ha? Mr. Vaughan omitted to give us a few racy line? on Sir Matthew 
Hale'? Divine Contemplations of the Magnet, Sir Kenelm Digby's Weapon- Sale e, 
and Valentine Greatrake's Magnetic Cures f He should have told the world a 
little, too, about the strange phenomenon of the Jesuit Kircher, in whom Po- 
pery attempted to recover "the very ground which Behmen and the Protestant 
nature-mystics were conquering from them. 



162 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

able little sketch it is, and one which goes far to clear up the 
moral character, and the reputation for sanity, also, of that much 
calumniated philosopher, whom the world knows only as a 
dreaming false prophet, forgetting that even if he was that, he 
was also a sound and severe scientific labourer, to whom our 
modern physical science is most deeply indebted. 

This is a short sketch of the contents of a book which is a 
really valuable addition to English literature, and which is as 
interesting as it is instructive. But Mr. Vaughan must forgive 
us if we tell him frankly that he has not exhausted the subject; 
that he has hardly defined mysticism at all — at least, has defined 
it by its outward results, and that without classifying them ; and 
that he has not grasped the central idea of the subject. There 
were more things in these same mystics than are dreamt of in 
his philosophy ; and he has missed seeing them, because he has 
put himself rather in the attitude of a judge than of an inquirer. 
He has not had respect and trust enough for the men and women 
of whom he writes, and is too much inclined to laugh at them, and 
treat them de haut en has. He has trusted too much to his own great 
power of logical analysis, and his equally great power of illus- 
tration, and is therefore apt to mistake the being able to put a 
man's thoughts into words for him, for the being really able to 
understand him. To understand any man, we must have sym- 
pathy for him, even affection. No intellectual acuteness, no 
amount even of mere pity for his errors, will enable us to see 
the man from within, and put our own souls into the place of his 
soul. To do that, one must feel and confess within one's self the 
seeds of the very same errors which one reproves in him ; one 
must have passed more or less through his temptations, doubts, 
hungers of heart and brain ; and one cannot help questioning, as 
one reads Mr. Vaughan's book, whether he has really done this 
in the case of those of whom he writes. He should have remem- 
bered, too, how little any young man can have experienced of 
the terrible sorrows which branded into the hearts of these old 
devotees the truths to which they clung more than to life, while 
they too often warped their hearts into morbidity, and caused 
alike their folly and their wisdom. Gently indeed should we 
speak even of the dreams of some self-imagined " Bride of 
Christ," when we picture to ourselves the bitter agonies which 
must have been endured ere a human soul could develop so 
fantastically-diseased a growth. " She was only a hysterical 
nun." Well, and what more tragical object, to those who will 
look patiently and lovingly at human nature, than a hysterical 
nun ? She may have been driven into a convent by some disap- 
pointment in love. And has not disappointed affection been 



HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 163 

confessed, in all climes and ages, to enshroud its victim ever 
after, as it were, in a sanctuary of reverent pity ? If sorrow 
"broke her brains," as well as broke her heart, shall we do 
aught but love her the more for her capacity of love ? Or she 
may have entered the convent, as thousands did, in girlish sim- 
plicity, to escape from a world which she had not tried, before 
she had discovered that the world could give her something 
which the convent could not. What more tragical than her 
discovery in herself of a capacity for love which could never be 
satisfied within that prison ? — and worse, when that capacity 
began to vindicate itself in strange forms of disease, seemingly 
to her supernatural, often agonizing, often degrading, and at the 
same time (strange contradiction) mixed itself up with her 
noblest thoughts, to ennoble them still more, and inspire her 
with a love for all that is fair and lofty, for self-devotion and 
self-sacrifice, such as she had never felt before ? Shall we 
blame her — shall we even smile at her, if, after the dreadful 
question, " Is this the possession of a demon ? " had alternated 
with " Is this the inspiration of a god ? " she settled down, as the 
only escape from madness and suicide, into the latter thought, 
and believed that she found in the ideal and perfect manhood of 
One whom she was told to revere and love as a God, and who 
had sacrificed his own life for her, a substitute for that merely 
human affection from which she was for ever debarred ? Why 
blame her for not remembering that which was wanting, or 
making straight that which was crooked ? Let God judge her, 
not we ; and the fit critics of her conduct are not the easy 
gentlemanlike scholars, like Mr. Vaughan's Athertons and Gow- 
ers, discussing the " aberrations of fanaticism " over wine and 
walnuts ; or the gay girl, Kate ; hardly even the happy mother, 
Mrs. Atherton : but those whose hairs are gray with sorrow ; 
who have been softened at once and hardened in the fire of God ; 
w T ho have cried out of the bottomless deep like David, while 
lover and friend were hid away from them, and they lay amid 
the corpses of their dead hopes, dead health, dead joy, as on a 
ghastly battle-field, " stript among the dead, like those who are 
wounded, and cut away from God's hands ; " who have struggled 
drowning in the horrible mire of doubt, and have felt all God's 
billows and waves sweep over them, till they were weary of 
crying, and their sight failed for waiting so long upon God ; and 
all the faith and prayer which was left was, u Thou wilt not leave 
my soul in hell, nor suffer thy Holy One to see corruption." Be 
it understood, however, for fear of any mistake, that we hold 
Mr. Vaughan to be simply and altogether right in his main idea. 
His one test for all these people, and all which they said or did, 



164 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

is — Were they made practically better men and women thereby ? 
He sees clearly that the " spiritual " is none other than the 
" moral" — that which has to do with right and wrong ; and he 
has a righteous contempt for every thing and any thing, however 
graceful and reverent, and artistic and devout, and celestial and 
super-celestial, except in as far as he finds it making men and 
women do better work in every-day life. Therefore he is 
altogether right at heart ; and any criticisms of ours on his book 
are but amantium irce. 

And therefore we will protest against such a sketch as this, 
even of one of the least honourable of the middle-age saints : — 

Atherton. Angela de Foligni, who made herself miserable — I 
must say something the converse of flourished — about the beginning 
of the fourteenth century, was a fine model pupil of this sort, a gen- 
uine daughter of St. Francis. Her mother, her husband, her children 
dead, she is alone and sorrowful. She betakes herself to violent 
devotion — falls ill — suffers incessant anguish from a complication of 
disorders — has rapturous consolations and terrific temptations— is 
dashed in a moment from a seat of glory above the empyrean . . . 

Yery amusing, is it not? To have one's mother, husband, 
children die — the most commonplace sort of thing — what (over 
one's wine and walnuts) one describes as being u alone and sor- 
rowful." Men who having tasted the blessings conveyed in 
those few words, have also found the horror conveyed in them, 
have no epithets for the state of mind in which such a fate would 
leave them. They simply pray that if that hour came, they 
might just have faith enough left not to curse God and die. Amus- 
ing, too, her falling ill, and suffering under a complication of dis- 
orders, especially if those disorders were the fruit of combined 
grief and widowhood. Amusing, also, her betaking herself to 
violent devotion. In the first place, if devotion be a good thing, 
could she have too much of it ? If it be the way to make people 
good (as is commonly held by all Christian sects,) could she 
become too good ? The more important question which springs 
out of the fact, we will ask presently. " She has rapturous con- 
solations and terrific temptations." Do you mean that the con- 
solations came first, and that the temptations were a revulsion 
from " spiritual " exaltation into " spiritual " collapse and melan- 
choly, or that the temptations came first, and the consolations 
came after to save her from madness and despair ? Either may 
be the case ; perhaps both were : but somewhat more of care 
should have been taken in expressing so important a spiritual 
sequence as either case exhibits. 

It is twelve years and more since we studied the history of 



HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 165 

the " B. Angela de Foligni," and many another kindred saint ; and 
we cannot recollect what were the terrific temptations, what was 
the floor of hell which the poor thing saw yawning beneath her 
feet. But we must ask Mr. Vaughan, has he ever read Boccaccio, 
or any of the Italian novelists up to the seventeenth century ? 
And if so, can he not understand how Angela de Foligni, the 
lovely Italian widow of the fourteenth century, had her terrific 
temptations, to which if she had yielded, she might have fallen 
to the lowest pit of hell, let that word mean what it may ; and 
temptations all the more terrific because she saw every widow 
round her considering them no temptations at all, but yielding to 
them, going out to invite them in the most business-like, nay, 
duty -like, way ? What if she had " rapturous consolations ? " 
What if she did pour out to One who was worthy not of less 
but of more affection than she offered in her passionate southern 
heart, in language which in our colder northerns would be mere 
hypocrisy, yet which she had been taught to believe lawful by 
that interpretation of the Canticles w T hich (be it always remem- 
bered) is common to Evangelicals and to Romanists ? What if 
even, in reward for her righteous belief, that what she saw all 
widows round her doing, was abominable and to be avoided at all 
risks, she were permitted to enjoy a passionate affection, which 
after all was not misplaced ? There are mysteries in religion, as 
in all things, where it is better not to intrude behind the veil. 
Wisdom is justified of all her children, and folly may be justified 
of some of her children also. Let Mr. Vaughan consider Boc- 
caccio, and reconsider his harshness to poor Angela ; let him 
reconsider, too, his harshness to poor St. Brigitta, — in our eyes a 
beautiful and noble figure. A widow she, too — and what worlds 
of sorrow 7 are there in that word, especially when applied to the 
pure deep-hearted Northern woman, as she was, — she leaves her 
Scandinavian pine-forests to worship and to give wherever she 
can, till she arrives at Rome, the centre of the universe, the seat 
of Christ's vicegerent, the city of God, the gate of Paradise. 
Thousands of weary miles she travels, through danger and sor- 
row- — and when she finds it, behold, it is a lie and a sham ; not 
the gate of Paradise, but the gate of Sodom and of hell. Was 
not that enough to madden her, if mad she became ? What 
matter after that her " angel dictated discourses on the Blessed 
Virgin," "bombastic invocations to the Saviour's eyes, ears, 
hair ? " — they were at least the best objects of worship which 
the age gave her. In one thing she was right, and kept her first 
love. " What was not quite so bad, she gives to the world a 
series of revelations, in which the vices of popes and prelates 
are lashed unsparingly, and threatened with speedy judgment." 



166 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Not quite so bad. To us the whole phenomenon wears an utterly 
different aspect. At the risk of her life, at the risk of being 
burned alive — did any one ever consider what that means ? — the 
noble Norsewoman, like an Alruna maid of old, hurls out her 
divine hereditary hatred of sin and filth and lies. At last she 
falls back on Christ himself as the only home for a homeless soul 
in such an evil time. And she is not burnt alive. The hand 
of One mightier than she is over her, and she is safe under the 
shadow of his wings, till her weary work is done and she goes 
home, her righteousness accepted for his sake: her folly, 
hysterics, dreams — call them by what base name we will — for- 
given and forgotten for the sake of her many sorrows, and her 
faithfulness to the end. 

Mr. Vaughan must reconsider these sketches; but he need 
not reconsider his admirable reflections on them, every word of 
which is true : — 

" What a condemning comment on the pretended tender mercies of 
the Church are those narratives which Rome delights to parade of the 
sufferings, mental and bodily, which her devotees were instructed to 
inflict upon themselves ! I am reminded of the thirsting mule, which 
has, in some countries, to strike with its hoof among the spines of the 
cactus, and drink, with lamed foot and bleeding lips, the few drops of 
milk which ooze from the broken thorns. Affectionate suffering 
natures came to Rome for comfort ; but her scanty kindness is only to 
be drawn with anguish from the cruel sharpness of asceticism. The 
worldly, the audacious, escape easily ; but these pliant, excitable tem- 
peraments, so anxiously in earnest, may be made useful. The more 
dangerous, frightful, or unnatural their performances, the more profit 
for their keepers. Men and women are trained by torturing processes 
to deny their nature, and then they are exhibited to bring grist to the 
mill — like birds and beasts forced to postures and services against the 
laws of their being — like those who must perform perilous feats on 
ropes or with lions, nightly hazarding their lives to fill the pockets of 
a manager. The self-devotion of which Rome boasts so much is a self- 
devotion she has always thus made the most of for herself. Calculat- 
ing men, who have thought only of the interest of the priesthood, 
have known well how best to stimulate and to display the spasmodic 
movements of a brainsick disinterestedness. I have not the shadow 
of a doubt that, once and again, some priest might have been seen, 
with cold, gray eye, endeavouring to do a stroke of diplomacy by 
means of the enthusiastic Catharine, making the fancied ambassadress 
of heaven in reality the tool of a schemer. Such unquestionable 
virtues as these visionaries may some of them have possessed, cannot 
be fairly set down to the credit of the Church, which has used them 
all for mercenary or ambitious purposes, and infected them everywhere 
with a morbid character. Some of these^ mystics, floating down the 
great ecclesiastical current of the Middle Age, appear to me like the 
trees carried away by the inundation of some mighty tropical river. 



HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 167 

They drift along the stream, passive, lifeless, broken ; yet they are 
covered with gay verdure, the aquatic plants hang and twine about 
the sodden timber and the draggled leaves, the trunk is a sailing 
garden of flowers. But the adornment is not that of nature — it is 
the decoration of another and a strange element ; the roots are in the 
air ; the boughs, which should be full of birds, are in the flood, covered 
by its alien products, swimming side by side with the alligator. So 
has this priestcraft swept its victims from their natural place and in- 
dependent growth, to clothe them, in their helplessness, with a false 
spiritual adornment, neither scriptural nor human, but ecclesiastical — 
the native product of that overwhelming superstition which has sub- 
verted and enslaved their nature. The Church of Rome takes care 
that while simple souls think they are cultivating Christian graces, 
they shall be forging their own chains ; that their attempts to honour 
God shall always dishonour, because they disenfranchise themselves. 
To be humble, to be obedient, to be charitable, under such direction, 
is to be contentedly ignorant, pitably abject, and notoriously swindled." 

Mr. Vaughan cannot be too severe upon the Romish priest- 
hood. But it is one thing to dismiss with summary contempt 
men who, as they do, keep the keys of knowledge, and neither 
enter in themselves nor suffer others to enter, and quite another 
thing to apply the same summary jurisdiction to men who, under 
whatsoever confusions, are feeling earnestly and honestly after 
truth. And therefore we regret exceedingly the mock trial which 
he has introduced into his Introduction. We regret it for his 
own sake ; for it will drive away from the book — indeed, it has 
driven — thoughtful and reverent people who, having a strong 
though vague inclination toward the mystics, might be veiy 
profitably taught by the after pages to separate the evil from the 
good in the Bernards and Guyons whom they admire, they scarce 
know why ; and will shock, too, scholars to whom Hindoo and 
Persian thoughts on these subjects are matters not of ridicule, 
fat of solemn and earnest investigation. We do hope to see 
#iese pages vanish from a future edition, or if they be retained, 
.^put at the end and not at the beginning of the book. As it is, 
they are a needless stumbling-block upon the threshold. 

Besides, the question is not so easily settled. Putting aside 
the flippancy of the passage, it involves something very like a 
petitio principii to ask off hand " Does the man mean a living 
union of heart to Christ, a spiritual fellowship or converse with 
the Father, when he talks of the union of the believer with God 
— participation in the Divine nature ? " For first, what we want 
to know is, the meaning of the words — what means " living ? " 
what " union ? " what " heart ? " They are terms common to the 
mystic and to the popular religionist, only differently interpreted ; 
and in the meanings attributed to them lies nothing less than the 



168 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

whole world-old dispute between Nominalist and Realist ; not 
yet to be settled in two lines by two gentlemen over their wine, 
much less ignored as a thing settled beyond all dispute already. 
If by " living union of heart with " — Mr. Vaughan means " iden- 
tity of morals with " — let him say so : but let him bear in mind 
that all the great Evangelicals have meant much more than this 
by those words ; that on the whole, instead of considering — as 
he seems to do, and we do — the moral and the spiritual as identi- 
cal, they have put them in antithesis to each other, and looked 
down upon " mere morality " just because it did not seem to them 
to involve that supernatural, transcendental, " mystic " element 
which they considered that they found in Scripture. From 
Luther to Owen and Baxter, from them to Wesley, Cecil, and 
Venn, Newton, Bridges, the great Evangelical authorities would 
(not very clearly or consistently, for they were but poor meta- 
physicians, but honestly and earnestly) accept some modified 
form of the mystic's theory, even to the " discerning in particular 
thoughts, frames, impulses, and inward witnessings, immediate 
communications from heaven." Surely Mr. Vaughan must be 
aware that the majority of " vital Christians " on this ground are 
among his mystic offenders ; and that those who deny such pos- 
sibilities are but too liable to be stigmatized as " Pelagians " and 
" Rationalists." His friend Atherton is bound to show cause 
why those names are not to be applied to him, as he is bound to 
show what he means by " living union with Christ," and why he 
complains of the mystic for desiring " participation in the Divine 
nature." If he does so, he only desires what the New Testa- 
ment formally, and word for word, promises him : whatsoever be 
the meaning of the term, he is not to be blamed for using it. 
Mr. Vaughan cannot have forgotten the many expressions, both 
of St. Paul and St. John, which do at first sight go far to justify 
the mystic, though they are but seldom heard, and more seldom 
boldly commented on, in modern pulpits, — of Christ being formed 
in men, dwelling in men ; of God dwelling in man and man in 
God ; of Christ being the life of men, of men living, and mov- 
ing, and having their being in God ; and many another passage. 
If these be mere metaphors, let the fact be stated, with due rea- 
sons for it. But there is no sin or shame in interpreting them 
in that literal and realist sense in which they seem at first sight 
to have been written. The first duty of a scholar who sets 
before himself to investigate the phenomena of " mysticism," so 
called, should be to answer these questions : Can there be a 
direct communication, above and beyond sense or consciousness, 
between the human spirit and God the Spirit ? And if so, what 
are its conditions, where its limits, to transcend which is to fall 
into " mysticism ? " 



HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 169 

And it is just this which Mr. Yaughan fails in doing. In his 
sketch, for instance, of the mysticism of India, he gives us a very- 
clear and (save in two points) sound summary of that " round 
of notions, occurring to minds of similar make under similar 
circumstances," which is " common to mystics in ancient India 
and in modern Christendom." 

" Summarily, I would say, this Hindoo mysticism — 

(1.) Lays claim to disinterested love as opposed to a mercenary 
religion ; 

(2.) Reacts against the ceremonial prescription and pedantic liter- 
alism of the Vedas ; 

(3.) Identifies, in its pantheism, subject and object, worshipper and 
worshipped ; 

(4.) Aims at ultimate absorption in the Infinite ; 

(5.) Inculcates, as the way to this dissolution, absolute passivity, 
withdrawal into the inmost self, cessation of all the powers, — giving 
recipes for procuring this beatific torpor or trance ; 

(6.) Believes that eternity may thus be realized in time ; 

(7.) Has its mythical miraculous pretensions, i. e., its theurgic de- 
partment ; 

(8.) And, finally, advises the learner in this kind of religion to 
submit himself implicitly to a spiritual guide, — his Guru." 

Against the two latter articles we except. The theurgic de- 
partment of mysticism — unfortunately but too common — seems to 
us always to have been the despairing return to that ceremoni- 
alism which it had begun by shaking off, when it was disap- 
pointed in reaching its high aim by its proper method. The use 
of the Guru, or Father Confessor, (which Mr. Yaughan confesses 
to be inconsistent with mysticism,) is to be explained in the same 
way ; he is a last refuge after disappointment. 

But as for the first six counts. Is the Hindoo mystic a worse 
or a better man for holding them ? Are they on the whole right 
or wrong ? Is not disinterested love nobler than a mercenary 
religion ? Is it not right to protest against ceremonial prescrip- 
tions, and to say, whether with David or with Aaron, " Thinkest 
thou that He will eat bull's flesh, and drink the blood of goats. 
Sacrifice and burnt-offering thou wouldst not. ... I come to do 
thy will, O God ! " What is, even, if he will look calmly into it, 
the " pantheistic identification of subject and object, worshipper 
and worshipped," but the clumsy yet honest effort of the human 
mind to say to itself, " Doing God's will is the real end and aim 
of man ? " The Yogi looks round upon his fellow men, and 
sees that all their misery and shame come from self-will ; he 
looks within, and finds that all which makes him miserable, 
angry, lustful, greedy after this and that, comes from the same 



170 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

self-will. And he asks himself, How shall I escape from this 
torment of self? — how shall I tame my wayward will, till it shall 
become one with the harmonious, beautiful, and absolute Will 
which made all things ? At least, I will try to do it, whatever 
it shall cost me. I will give up all for which men live — wife 
and child, the sights, scents, sounds of this fair earth, all things, 
whatever they be, which men call enjoyment, I will make this 
life one long torture, if need be, but this rebel will of mine I will 
conquer. I ask for no reward. That may come in some future 
life. But what care I. I am now miserable by reason of the 
lusts which war in my members ; the peace which I shall gain 
in being freed from them will be its own reward. After all I 
give up little. All these things round me — the primaeval forest, 
and the sacred stream of Ganga, the mighty Himalaya, mount 
of God, ay, the illimitable vault of heaven above me, sun and 
stars — what are they but " such stuff as dreams are made of ? " 
Brahm thought, and they became something and somewhere. 
He may think again, and they will become nothing and nowhere. 
Are these eternal, greater than I, worth troubling my mind 
about ? Nothing is eternal, but the Thought which made them, 
and will unmake them. They are only venerable in my eyes, 
because each of them is a thought of Brahni's. And I, too, 
have thought ; I alone of all the kinds of living things. Am I 
not, then, akin to God ? what better for me than to sit down and 
think, as Brahm thinks, and so enjoy my eternal heritage, leav- 
ing for those who cannot think, the passions and pleasures which 
they share in common with the beasts of the field ? So I shall 
become more and more like Brahm; will his will, think his 
thoughts, till I lose utterly this house-fiend of self, and become 
one with God ? 

Is this a man to be despised ? Is he a sickly dreamer, or a 
too valiant hero ? and if any one be shocked at this last utter- 
ance, let him consider carefully the words which he may hear 
on Sunday ; " Then we dwell in Christ, and Christ in us ; we 
are one with Christ, and Christ with us." That belief is surely 
not a false one. Shall we abhor the Yogi because he has seen, 
sitting alone there amid idolatry and licentiousness, despotism 
and priestcraft, that the ideal goal of man is what we confess it 
to be in the communion service ? Shall we not rather wonder 
and rejoice over the magnificent utterances in that Bagvat-Gita 
which Mr. Vaughan takes — as w r e do- — for the text-book of 
Hindoo mysticism, which proceed from the mouth of Crishna, 
the teacher human, and yet God himself. 

" There is nothing greater than I ; all things hang on me, as precious 



HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 171 

gems upon a string I am life in all things, and zeal in the zealous. 

I am the eternal seed of nature : I am the understanding of the wise, the 
glory of the proud, the strength of the strong, free from lust and anger. 
.... Those who trust in me know Brahm, the supreme and incorruptible. 
.... In this body I am the teacher of worship. He who thinks of me will 

find me. He who finds me returns not again to mortal birth I am 

the sacrifice, I am the worship, I am the incense, I am the fire, I am 
the victim, I am the father and mother of the world ; I am the road 
of the good, the comforter, the creator, the witness, the asylum, and 
the friend. They who serve other gods with a firm belief, involuntarily 
worship me. I am the same to all mankind. They who serve me in 
adoration are in me. If one whose ways are ever so evil serve me 
alone, he becometh of a virtuous spirit and obtaineth eternal happi- 
ness. Even women, and the tribes of Visga and Soodra, shall go the 
supreme journey, if they take sanctuary with me ; how much more my 
holy servants the Brahmins and the Ragarshees ! Consider this world 
as a finite and joyless place, and serve me." 

There may be confused words scattered up and down here ; 
there are still more confused words — not immoral ones — round 
them, which we have omitted ; but we ask, once and for all, is 
this true, or is it not? Is there a being who answers to this 
description, or is there not ? And if there be, was it not a light 
price to pay for the discovery of him " to sit upon the sacred 
grass called koos, with his mind fixed on one object alone ; keep- 
ing his head, neck, and body steady, without motion ; his eyes 
fixed upon the point of his nose, looking at no other place around " 
— or any other simple, even childish, practical means of getting 
rid of the disturbing bustle and noise of the outward, time-world, 
that he might see the eternal world which underlies it ? What 
if the discovery be imperfect, the figure in my features errone- 
ous ? Is not the wonder to us, the honour to him, that the figure 
should be there at all ? Inexplicable to us on any ground, save 
that one common to the Bagvat-Gita, to the gospel. " He who 
seeks me shall find me." What if he knew but in part, and saw 
through a glass darkly ? Was there not One greater than he 
who, in the full light of inspiration, could but say the very same 
thing of himself, and look forward to a future life in which he 
would " know even as he was known ? " 

It is well worth observing, too, that so far from the moral of 
this Bagvat-Gita issuing in mere contemplative Quietism, its 
purpose is essentially practical. It arises out of Arjoun's doubt 
whether he shall join in the battle which he sees raging below 
him ; it results in his being commanded to join in it, and fight like 
a man. We cannot see, as Mr. Vaughan does, an " unholy in- 
difference " in the moral. Arjoun shrinks from fighting because 
friends and relatives are engaged on both sides, and he dreads 



172 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

hell if he kills one of them. The answer to his doubt is, after 
all, the only one which makes war permissible to a Christian, 
who looks on all men as his brothers : — 

" You are a Ksahtree, a soldier ; your duty is to fight. Do 
your duty, and leave the consequences of it to Him who com- 
manded the duty. You cannot kill these men's souls any more 
than they can yours. You can only kill their mortal bodies ; the 
fate of their souls and yours depends on their moral state. Kill 
their bodies, then, if it be your duty, instead of tormenting your- 
self with scruples, which are not really scruples of conscience, 
only selfish fears of harm to yourself, and leave their souls to 
the care of Him who made them, and knows them, and cares 
more for them than you do." 

This seems to be the plain outcome of the teaching. What is 
it, mutatis mutandis, but the sermon, " cold-blooded " or not, 
which every righteous soldier in the Crimea has had to preach 
to himself, day by day, for the last two years ? 

Yet the fact is undeniable that Hindoo mysticism has failed of 
practical result — that it has died down into brutal fakeerism. We 
look in vain, however, in Mr. Vaughan's chapter for an explana- 
tion of this fact, save his assertion, which we deny, that Hindoo 
mysticism was an essence and at its root wrong and rotten. Mr. 
Maurice {Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, p. 46) seems to 
point to a more charitable solution. " The Hindoo " (he says) 
" whatsoever vast discovery he may have made at an early period 
of a mysterious Teacher near him, working on his spirit, who is 
at the same time Lord over nature, began the search from him- 
self — he had no other point from whence to begin — and there- 
fore it ended in himself. The purification of his individual soul 
became practically his highest conceivable end ; to carry out that 
he must separate from society. Yet the more he tries to escape 
self the more he finds self; for what are his thoughts about 
Bram, his thoughts about Krishna, save his own thoughts ? Is 
Brahm a projection of his own soul ? To sink in him, does it 
mean to be nothing ? Am I, after all, my own law ? And hence 
the downward career into stupid indifferentism, even into Anti- 
nomian profligacy." 

The Hebrew, on the other hand, begins from the belief of an 
objective external God, but one who cares for more than his in- 
dividual soul ; as one who is the ever-present guide, and teacher, 
and ruler of his whole nation ; who regards that nation as a 
whole, a one person, and that not merely one present generation, 
but all, past or future, as a one " Israel ; " law-givers, prophets, 
priests, warriors. All classes are his ministers. He is essen- 
tially a political deity, who cares infinitely for the polity of a 



HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 173 

nation, and therefore bestows one upon them — "a law of Jeho- 
vah." Gradually, under this teaching, the Hebrew rises to the 
very idea of an inward teacher, which the Yogi had, and to a 
far purer and clearer form of that idea ; but he is not tempted 
by it to selfish individualism, or contemplative isolation, as long 
as he is true to the old Mosaic belief, that this being is the Po- 
litical Deity, " the King of kings." The Pharisee becomes a 
selfish individualist just because he has forgotten this ; the 
Essene, a selfish " mystic " for the same reason ; Philo and the 
Jewish mystics of Alexandria lose in like manner all notion that 
Jehovah is the lawgiver, and ruler, and archetype of family and 
of national life. The early Christians retain the idea ; they 
bring out the meaning of the old Jewish polity in its highest 
form : for that very reason they are able to bring out the mean- 
ing of the " mystic " idea in its highest form also, without injury 
to their work as members of families, as citizens, as practical 
men of the world. 

And here let us say boldly to Mr. Vaughan and to our readers 
— As long as " the salvation of a man's own soul " is set forth in 
all pulpits as the first and last end and aim of mortal existence ; 
as long as Christianity is dwelt on merely as influencing individ- 
uals each apart — as " brands plucked, one here and another 
there, from the general burning," — so long will mysticism, in its 
highest form, be the refuge of the strongest spirits, and its more 
base and diseased forms the refuge of the weak and sentimental 
spirits. They will say, each in his own way — " You confess that 
there can be a direct relation, communion, inspiration, from God 
to my soul, as I sit alone in my chamber. You do not think 
that there is such between God and what you call the world ; 
between Him and nations as wholes, — families, churches, schools 
of thought, as wholes ; that He does not take a special interest, 
or exercise a special influence, over the ways and works of men 
— over science, commerce, civilization, colonization, all which 
affects the earthly destinies of the race. All these you call secu- 
lar ; to admit his influence over them for their own sake (though 
of course He overrules them for the sake of his elect) savours of 
Pantheism. Is it so ? Then we will give up the world. We 
will cling to the one fact which you confess to be certain about 
us, that we can take refuge in God, each in the loneliness of his 
chamber, from all the vain turmoil of a race which is hastening 
heedless into endless misery. You may call us mystics, or what 
you will. We will possess our souls in patience, and turn away 
our eyes from vanity. We will commune with our own hearts 
in solitude, and be still. We will not even mingle in your reli- 
gious world, the world which you have invented for yourselves, 



174 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

after denying that God's human world is sacred ; for it seems to 
us as full of intrigue, ambition, party-spirit, falsehood, bitterness, 
and ignorance, as the political world, or the fashionable world, 
or the scientific world ; and we will have none of it. Leave us 
alone with God." 

This has been the true reason of mystical isolation in every 
age and country. So thought Macarius and the Christian fakeers 
of the Thebaid. So thought the mediaeval monks and nuns. So 
thought the German Quietists when they revolted from the fierce 
degradation of decaying Lutheranism. So are hundreds thinking 
now ; so may thousands think ere long. If the individualizing 
phase of Christianity which is now dominant shall long retain its 
ascendency, and the creed of Dr. Gumming and Mr. Spurgeon 
become that of the British people, our purest and noblest spirits 
will act here, with regard to religion, as the purest and noblest 
in America have acted with regard to politics. They will with- 
draw each into the sanctuary of his own heart, and leave the 
battle-field to rival demagogues. They will do wrong, it may 
be. Isolation involves laziness, pride, cowardice ; but if sober 
England, during the next half-century, should be astonished by 
an outburst of mysticism, as grand in some respects, as fantastic 
in others, as that of the thirteenth or the seventeenth centuries, the 
blame, if blame there be, will lie with those leaders of the public 
conscience who, after having debased alike the Church of Eng- 
land and the dissenting sects with a selfish individualism which 
was as foreign to the old Cromwellite Ironside as to the High 
Church divine, have tried to debar their disciples from that 
peaceful and graceful mysticism which is the only excusable or 
tolerable form of a religion beginning and ending in self. 

Let it be always borne in mind, that Quakerism was not a 
protest against, or a revulsion from, the Church of England, but 
from Calvinism. The steeple-houses, against which George Fox 
testified, were not served by Henry Mores, Cudworths, or Nor- 
rises : not even by dogmatist High-Churchmen, but by Calvinist 
ministers, who had ejected them. George Fox developed his 
own scheme, such as it was, because the popular Protestantism 
of his day failed to meet the deepest wants of his heart ; because, 
as he used to say, it gave him " a dead Christ," and he required 
a " living Christ." Doctrines about who Christ is, he held, are 
not Christ himself. Doctrines about what he has done for man, 
are not He himself. Fox held, that if Christ be a living person, 
He must act (when he acted) directly on the most inward and 
central personality of him, George Fox ; and his desire was 
satisfied by the discovery of the indwelling. Logos, or rather by 
its rediscovery, after it had fallen into oblivion for centuries. 



HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS. 175 

Whether he were right or wrong, he is a fresh instance of a 
man's arriving, alone and unassisted, at the same idea at which 
mystics of all ages and countries have arrived ; a fresh corrobora- 
tion of our belief, that there must be some reality corresponding 
to a notion which has manifested itself so variously, and among 
so many thousands of every creed, and has yet arrived, by what- 
soever different paths, at one and the same result. 

That he was more or less right — that there is nothing in the 
essence of mysticism contrary to practical morality, Mr. Yaughan 
himself fully confesses. In his fair and liberal chapters on Fox 
and the Early Quakers, he does full justice to their intense prac- 
tical benevolence ; to the important fact that Fox only lived to 
do good, of any and every kind, as often as a sorrow to be soothed, 
or an evil to be remedied, crossed his path. We only wish that 
he had also brought in the curious and affecting account of Fox's 
interview with Cromwell, in which he tells us (and we will take 
Fox's word against any man) that the Protector gave him 
to understand, almost with tears, that there was that in Fox's 
faith which he was seeking in vain from the " ministers " around 
him. 

All we ask of Mr. Vaughan is, not to be afraid of his own evi- 
dent liking for Fox ; of his own evident liking for Tauler and 
his school ; not to put aside the question which their doctrines 
involve, with such half-utterances as — 

" The Quakers are wrong, I think, in separating particular move- 
ments and monitions as Divine. But, at the same time, the ' witness 
of the Spirit/ as regards our state before God, is something more, I 
believe, than the mere attestation to the written word." 

As for the former of these two sentences, he may be quite 
right, for aught we know. But it must be said, on the other 
hand, that not merely Quakers, but decent men of every creed 
and age, have — we may dare to say, in proportion to their de- 
voutness — believed in such monitions ; and that it is hard to see 
how any man could have arrived at the belief that a living person 
was working on him, and not a mere unpersonal principle, law, 
or afflatus — (spirit of the universe, or other metaphor for hiding 
materialism) — unless by believing rightly or wrongly, in such 
monitions. For our only inductive conception of a living person 
demands that that person shall make himself felt by separate 
acts. 

But against the second sentence we must protest. The ques- 
tion in hand is not whether this " witness of the Spirit " is " some- 
thing more " than anything else. But whether it exists at all, 



176 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES.- 

and what it is. Why was the book written, save to help toward 
the solution of this very matter ? The question all through has 
been — Can an immediate influence be exercised by the Spirit of 
God on the spirit of man ? Mr. Vaughan assents, and says (we 
cannot see why) that there is no mysticism in such a belief. Be 
that as it may, what that influence is, and how exercised, is all 
through the de quo agitur of mysticism. Mr. Vaughan, how- 
ever, seems here for awhile to be talking realism through an ad- 
mirable page, well worth perusal (pp. 264-5). Yet his grasp 
is not sure. We soon find him saying what More and Fox would 
alike deny, that " The story of Christ's life and death is our soul's 
food/' No ; Christ himself is, — would the English Church and 
the mystic alike answer. And here again, the whole matter in 
dispute is (unconsciously to Mr. Vaughan) opened up in one 
word. And if this sentence does not bear directly on that 
problem, on what does it bear? It was therefore with extreme 
disappointment that on reading this, and saying to ourselves, 
" Now we shall hear at last what Mr. Vaughan himself thinks 
on the matter," we found that he literally turned the subject off, 
as if not worth investigation, by making the next speaker ans- 
wer, a propos of nothing, that u the traditional asceticism of the 
Friends is their fatal defect as a body." 

Why, too, has Mr. Vaughan devoted a few lines only to the 
great English Platonists, More, Norris, Smith of Jesus, Gale, 
and Cudworth ? He says, indeed, that they are scarcely mystics, 
except in as far as Platonism is always in a measure mystical. 
In our sense of the word,. they were all of them mystics, and of 
a very lofty type ; but surely Henry More is a mystic in Mr. 
Vaughan's sense also. If the author of Conjectura Cabbalistica 
be not a mystical writer (he himself uses the term without shame), 
who is ? 

We hope to see much in this book condensed, much modified, 
much worked out, instead of being left fragmentary and embry- 
otic ; but whether our hope be fulfilled or not, a useful and 
honourable future is before the man who could write such a book 
as this is, in spite of all defects. 



TENNYSON. 177 



TENNYSON. 

[F?rf.ser's Magazine.] 

Critics cannot in general be too punctilious in their respect 
for an incognito. If an author intended us to know his name, he 
would put it on his title-page. If he does not choose to do that, 
we have no more right to pry into his secret than we have to 
discuss his family affairs or open his letters. But every rule has 
its exceptional cases : and the book which stands first upon our 
list is surely such. All the world, somehow or other, knows the 
author. His name has been mentioned unhesitatingly by several 
reviews already, whether from private information, or from the 
certainty which every well-read person must feel, that there is 
but one man in England possessed at once of poetic talent and 
artistic experience sufficient for so noble a creation. We hope, 
therefore, that we shall not be considered impertinent if we ignore 
an incognito which all England has ignored before us. and attrib- 
ute In Memoriam to the pen of the author of The Princess. 

Such a course will probably be the more useful one to our 
readers : for this last work of our only living great poet seems to 
us at once the culmination of all his efforts and the key to many 
difficulties in his former writings. Heaven forbid that we should 
say that it completes the circle of his powers. On the contrary, 
it gives us hope of vaster effort in new fields oi thought and forms 
of art. But it brings the development of his Muse and of his 
Creed to a positive and definite point. It enables us to claim 
one who has been hitherto regarded as belonging to a merely 
speculative and peirastic school as the willing and deliberate 
champion of vital Christianity, and of an orthodoxy the more sin- 
cere because it has worked upward through the abyss of doubt ; 
the more mighty for good because it justifies and consecrates the 
aesthetics and the philosophy of the present age. We are sure, 
moreover, that the author, whatever right reasons he may have 
had for concealing his own name, would have no quarrel against 

1. /// Memoriam. 2. Tht Princess, a Medley. 3. Poems, 

8* 



178 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

us for alluding to it, were lie aware of the absolute idolatry with 
which every utterance of his is regarded by the cultivated young 
men of our day, especially at the universities, and of the infinite 
service of which this In Memoriam ma*y be to them, if they are 
taught by it that their superiors are not ashamed of Faith, and 
that they will rise instead of falling, fulfil instead of denying the 
cravings of their hearts and intellects, if they will pass upwards 
with their teacher from the vague though noble expectations of 
Lochsley Hall, to the assured and everlasting facts of the. proem 
to In Memoriam, — in our eyes, the noblest Christian poem which 
England has produced for two centuries. 

To explain our meaning, it will be ne^eissary^ perhaps, to go 
back to Mr. Tennyson's earlier writings, of which he is said to 
be somewhat ashamed now, — a fastidiousness wibh which we will 
not quarrel ; for it should be the rule of the poet as well as of the 
apostle, " forgetting those things which are behind, to press on' to 
those things which are before," and " to count not himself to have 

apprehended, but" — no, we will not finish the quotation : let 

the readers of In Memoriam finish it for themselves, and see how 
after all the poet, if he would reach perfection, mast be found by 
Him who found St. Paul of old. In the mean time, as the poet 
must necessarily be in advance of his age, Mr. Tennyson's earlier 
poems, rather than these latter ones, coincide with the tastes and 
speculations of the young men of this day. And in proportion, 
we believe, as they thoroughly appreciate the distinctive pecu- 
liarities of those poems, will they be able to follow the author of 
them on his upward path. 

Some of our readers, we would fain hope, remember as an 
era in their lives the first day on which they read those earlier 
poems ; how, fifteen years ago, Mariana in the Moated Grange, 
The Dying Swan, The Lady of Shalott, came to them as revelations. 
They seemed to themselves to have found at last a poet who 
promised not only to combine the cunning melody of Moore, the 
rich fulness of Keats, and the simplicity of Wordsworth, but one 
who was introducing a method of observing Nature different from 
that of all the three, and yet succeeding in everything which they 
had attempted, often in vain. Both Keats and Moore had an 
eye for the beauty which lay in trivial and daily objects. But in 
both of them there was a want of deep religious reverence, which 
kept Moore playing gracefully upon the surface of phenomena 
without ever daring to dive into their laws or inner meaning ; 
and made poor Keats fancy that he was rather to render Nature 
poetical by bespangling her with florid ornament, than simply to 
confess that she was already, by the grace of God, far beyond 
the need of his paint and gilding. Even Wordsworth himself 



TEXXYSOX. 179 

had not full faitli in the -great dicta which he laid down in his 
famous Introductory Essay. Deep as was his conviction that 
Nature bore upon her simplest forms the finger-mark of God, he 
did not always dare simply to describe her as she was, and leave 
her to reveal her own mystery. We do not say this in deprecia- 
tion of one who stands now far above human praise or blame, to 
receive the meed of a life of love to God and man. The wonder 
is, not that Wordsworth rose no higher, but that, considering the 
level on which his taste was formed, he had power to rise to the 
height above his age which he did attain. He did a mighty 
work. He has left the marks of his teaching upon every poet 
who has written verses worth reading for the last twenty years. 
The idea by which he conquered was, as Coleridge well sets 
forth, the very one which, in its practical results on his own poe- 
try, procured him loud and deserved ridicule. This, which will 
be the root idea of the whole poetry of this generation, was the 
dignity of Nature in all her manifestations, and not merely in 
those which may happen to suit the fastidiousness or Manichee- 
ism of any particular age. He may have been at times fanatical 
on his idea, and have misused it, till it became self-contradictory, 
because he could not see the correlative truths which should have 
limited it. But it is by fanatics, by men of one great thought, 
that great works are done ; and it is good for the time that a man 
arose in it of fearless honesty enough to write Peter Bells and 
Idiot Boys, to shake all the old methods of nature-painting to 
their roots, and set every man seriously to ask himself what he 
meant, or whether he meant any thing real, reverent, or honest, 
when he talked about "poetic diction," or " the beauties of 
Nature. And after all, like all fanatics, Wordsworth was better 
than his own creed. As Coleridge thoroughly shows in the 
second volume of the Biographia Litter aria, and as may be seen 
nowhere more strikingly than in his grand posthumous work, his 
noblest poems and noblest stanzas are those in which his true 
poetic genius, unconsciously to himself, sets at nought his own 
pseudo-naturalist dogmas. 

Now, Mr. Tennyson, while fully adopting Wordsworth's prin- 
ciple from the very first, seemed by instinctive taste to have 
escaped the snares which had proved too subtle both for Keats 
and Wordsworth. Doubtless there are slight niaiseries, after the 
manner of both those poets, in the first editions of his earlier 
poems. He seems, like most other great artists, to have first 
tried imitations of various styles which already existed, before he 
learnt the art of incorporating them into his own, and learning 
from all his predecessors, without losing his own individual pecu- 
liarities. But there are descriptive passages in them also which 



180 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

neither Keats nor Wordsworth could have written, combining the 
honest sensuous observation which is common to them both, with 
a self-restrained simplicity which Keats did not live long enough 
to attain, and a stately and accurate melody, and earnest songful- 
ness (to coin a word) which Wordsworth seldom attained, and 
from his inaccurate and uncertain ear, still seldomer preserved 
without the occurrence of a jar or a rattle, a false quantity, a false 
rapture, or a bathos. And above all, or rather beneath all — for 
we suspect that this has been throughout the very secret of Mr. 
Tennyson's power — there was a hushed and a reverent awe, a 
sense of the mystery, the infinitude, the awfulness, as well as of 
the mere beauty of wayside things, which invested these poems 
as wholes with a peculiar richness, depth, and majesty of tone, 
beside which both Keats's and Wordsworth's methods of hand- 
ling pastoral subjects looked like the colouring of Julio Romano 
or Watteau, by the side of Correggio or Titian. 

This deep, simple faith in the divineness of Nature as she ap- 
pears, which, in our eyes, is Mr. Tennyson's differentia, is really 
the natural accompaniment of a quality at first sight its very oppo- 
site, and for which he is often blamed by a prosaic world ; namely, 
his subjective and transcendental mysticism. It is the mystic, 
after all, who will describe Nature most simply, because he sees 
most in her ; because he is most ready to believe that she will 
reveal to others the same message which she has revealed to 
him. Men like Boehmen, Novalis, and Fourier, who can soar 
into the inner cloud-world of man's spirit, even though they lose 
their way there, dazzled by excess of wonder, — men who, like 
Wordsworth, can give utterance to such subtle anthropologic 
wisdom as the Ode tathe Imitations of Immortality, will for that 
very reason most humbly and patiently " consider the lilies of the 
field, how they grow." And even so it is just because Mr. Tenny- 
son is, far more than Wordsworth, mystical, and what an ignorant 
and money-getting generation, idolatrous of mere sensuous activ- 
ity, calls " dreamy," that he has become the greatest naturalistic 
poet which England has seen for several centuries : the same 
faculty which enabled him to draw such subtle subjective pictures 
of womanhood as Adeline, Isabel, and Eleanor, enabled him to 
see, and therefore simply to describe, in one of the most distinc- 
tive and successful of his earlier poems, how 

The creeping mosses and clambering weeds, 

And the willow branches hoar and dank, 
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds, 

And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank, 
And the silvery marish-nowers that throng 
The desolate creeks and pools among, 
Were flooded over with eddying song. 



TENNYSON. 181 

No doubt there are in the earlier poems exceptions to this 
style, — attempts to adorn Nature, and dazzle with a barbaric 
splendour akin to that of Keats, — as, for instance, in the Recol- 
lections of the Arabian Nights. But how cold and gaudy, in 
spite of individual beauties, is that poem by the side of either of 
the Marianas, and especially of that one in which the scenery is 
drawn, simply and faithfully, from those counties which the 
world considers the quintescence of the prosaic — the English 
fens. 

Upon the middle of the night 

Waking she heard the night-fowl crow ; 
The cock sung out an hour ere light : 
From the dark fen the oxen's low 
Came to her: without hope of change, 
In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn, 
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn 
About the lonely moated grange. 

sj£ *j£ "n^ -T^ *T? 

About a stone-cast from the wall 

A sluice with blacken'd waters slept, 
And o'er it many, round and small, 

The cluster' d marish-mosses crept. 
Hard by a poplar shook alway, 

All silver-green with gnarled bark, 

For leagues no other tree did dark 
The level waste, the rounding gray. 

^ *T? ^TV ^TV -1^ *7? 

Throughout all these exquisite lines occurs but one instance of 
what the vulgar call " poetic diction." All is simple description, 
in short and Saxon words, and yet who can deny the effect to be 
perfect, — superior to almost any similar passage in Wordsworth ? 
And why ? Because the passage quoted, and indeed the whole 
poem, is perfect in what artists call to?ie, — tone in the metre and 
in the sound of the words, as well as in the images and the feel- 
ings expressed. The weariness, the dreariness, the dark myste- 
rious waste, exist alike within and without, in the slow monoto- 
nous pace of the metre and the words, as well as in the boundless 
fen, and the heart of her who, " without hope of change, in sleep 
did seem to walk forlorn." The same faith in Nature, the same 
instinctive correctness in melody, springing from that correct in- 
sight into Nature, ran through the poems inspired by mediaeval 
legends. The very spirit of the old ballad writers, with their 
combinations of mysticism and objectivity, their freedom from 
any self-conscious attempt at reflective epithets or figures, runs 
through them all. We are never jarred in them, as we are in all the 
attempts at ballad- writing and ballad-restoring before Mr. Tenny- 
son's time, by discordant touches of the reflective in thought, the 
picturesque in Nature, or the theatric in action. To illustrate 
our meaning, readers may remember the "ballad of Fair Emme- 



182 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

line, in Bishop Percy's Reliques. The bishop confesses, if we 

mistake not, to have patched the end of the ballad. He need not 

have informed us of that fact, while such lines as these following 

met our eyes, — 

The Baron turned aside, 
And wiped away the rising tears, 
He proudly strove to hide ( ! ! ! ) 

Conceive an old ballad writer dealing in such a complicated 
concetto ! As another, and even a worse instance, did any of our 
readers ever remark the difference between the old and new 
versions of the grand ballad of Glasgerion ? In the original, we 
hear How the eliin harper could 

Harp fish out of the water, 

And water out of a stone, 
And milk out of a maiden's breast 

That bairn had never none. 

For which some benighted " restorer " substitutes, — 

Oh, there was magic in his touch, 
And sorcery in his string ! 

No doubt there was. But while the new poetaster informs you 
of the abstract notion, the ancient poet gives you the concrete 
fact ; as Mr. Tennyson has done with wonderful art in his ex- 
quisite St. Agnes, where the saint's subjective mysticism appears 
only as embodied in objective pictures, — 

Break up the heavens, oh, Lord ! and far 

Through all yon starlight keen 
Draw me, thy bride, a glittering star, 

In raiment white and clean. 

Sir Walter Scott's ballads fail just on the same point. Even 
Campbell cannot avoid an occasional false note of sentiment. In 
Mr. Tennyson alone, as we think, the spirit of the middle age is 
perfectly reflected. Its delight, not in the " sublime and pictur- 
esque," but in the green leaves and spring flowers for their own 
sake, — the spirit of Chaucer and of the Robin Hood Garland, — 
the naturalism which revels as much in the hedgerow and garden 
as in alps, and cataracts, and Italian skies, and the other strong 
stimulants to the faculty of admiration which the palled taste of 
an unhealthy age, from Keats and Byron down to Browning, has 
rushed abroad to seek. It is enough for Mr. Tennyson's truly 
English spirit to see how 

On either side the river lie 
Long fields of barley and of rye, 
That clothe the wold and meet the sky; 
And through the field the road runs by 
To many-tower'd Camelot. 



TENNYSON. 183 



Or how, 



In the stormy east- wind straining, 
The pale yellow woods were waning, 
The broad stream in his banks complaining, 
Heavily the low sky raining 
Over tower'd Camelot. 

Give him but such scenery as that, which he can see in e very- 
parish in England, and he will find it a fit scene for an ideal 
myth, subtler than a casuist's questionings, deep as the deepest 
heart of woman. 

But in this earlier volume we have only the disjecta membra 
poetce. The poet has not yet arrived at the art of combining his 
new speculations on man with his new mode of viewing Nature. 
His objective pieces are too exclusively objective, his subjective 
too exclusively subjective ; and where he deals with natural 
imagery in these latter, he is too apt, as in Eleanore, to fall back 
upon the old and received method of poetic diction, though he 
never indulges in a commonplace or a stock epithet. But in the 
interval between 1830 and 1842 the needful interfusion of the 
two elements took place. And in Lochsley Hall and the Tivo 
Voices we find the new doubts and questions of the time embodied 
naturally and organically, in his own method of simple, natural 
expression. For instance, from the Search for Truth, in the 
Two Voices, — 

Cry, faint not, climb : the summits lope 
Beyond the furthest flights of hope, 
Wrapt in dense cloud from base to cope. 

Sometimes a little corner shines, 

As over rainy mist inclines 

A gleaming crag with belts of pines. 

"I will go forward," sayest thou; 
" I shall not fail to find her now. 
Look up, the fold is on her brow/' 

Or, again, in Lochsley Hall, the poem which, as we think 
deservedly, has had most influence on the minds of the young 
men of our day, — 

Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field, 

And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn, 

Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn; 

And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then, 

Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men; 

Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new: 

That which they have done but earnest of the things which they shall do : 

and all the grand prophetic passage following, which is said, 
we know not how truly, to have won for the poet the respect of 
that great statesman whose loss all good men this day deplore. 



184 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

In saying that Lochsley Hall has deservedly had so great an 
influence over the minds of the young, we shall, we are afraid, 
have offended some who are accustomed to consider that poem 
as Werterian and unhealthy. But, in reality, the spirit of the 
poem is simply anti-Werterian. It is a man rising out of sick- 
ness into health, — not conquered by Werterism, but conquering 
his selfish sorrow, and the moral and intellectual paralysis which 
it produces, by faith and hope, — faith in the progress of science 
and civilization, hope in the final triumph of good. Doubtless, 
that is not the highest deliverance, — not a permanent deliverance 
at all. Faith in God and hope in Christ alone can deliver a 
man once and for all, from Werterism or any other moral disease ; 
that truth was reserved for In Memoriam : but as far as Locks- 
ley Hall goes, it is a step forward — a whole moral aeon beyond 
Byron and Shelley ; and a step, too, in the right direction, just 
because it is a step forward, — because the path of deliverance is, 
as Lochsley Hall sets forth, not backwards towards a fancied par- 
adise of childhood — not backward to grope after an unconscious- 
ness which is now impossible, an implicit faith which would be 
unworthy of the man, but forward on the road on which God has 
been leading him, carrying upward with him the aspirations of 
childhood, and the bitter experience of youth, to help the organ- 
ized and trustful labour of manhood. There are, in fact, only 
two deliverances from Werterism possible in the nineteenth cen- 
tury ; one is into Popery, and the other is — 

Forward, forward, let us range ; 
Let the peoples spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change ; 
Through the shadow of the world we sweep into the younger day: 
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. 

But such a combination of powers as Mr. Tennyson's natur- 
ally develop themselves into a high idyllic faculty ; for it is the 
very essence of the idyl to set forth the poetry which lies in the 
simpler manifestations of Man and Nature ; yet not explicitly, 
by a reflective moralizing on them, as almost all our idyllists — 
Cowper, Gray, Crabbe, and Wordsworth — have been in the 
habit of doing, but implicitly, by investing them all with a rich 
and delightful tone of colouring, perfect grace of manner, perfect 
melody of rhythm, which, like a gorgeous summer atmosphere, 
shall glorify without altering the most trivial and homely sights. 
And it is this very power, as exhibited in the Lord of Burleigh, 
Audley Court, and the Gardener's Daughter, w^hich has made Mr. 
Tennyson not merely the only English rival of Thocritus and 
Bion, but, in our opinion, as much their superior as modern Eng- 
land is superior to ancient Greece. 

Yet in The Princess, perhaps, Mr. Tennyson rises higher still. 



TENNYSON. 185 

The idyllic manner alternates with the satiric, the pathetic, even 
the sublime, by such imperceptible gradations, and continual deli- 
cate variations of key, that the harmonious medley of his style 
becomes the fit outward expression of the bizarre and yet har- 
monious fairy-land, in which his fancy ranges. In this work, too, 
Mr. Tennyson shows himself more than ever the poet of the day. 
In it more than ever the old is interpenetrated with the new — 
the domestic and scientific with the ideal and sentimental. He 
dares, in every page, to make use of modern words and notions, 
from which the mingled clumsiness and archaism of his compeers 
shrinks, as unpoetical. Though, as we just said, his stage is an 
ideal fairy-land, yet he has reached the ideal by the only true 
method, — by bringing the Middle age forward to the Present 
one, and not by ignoring the Present to fall back on a cold and 
galvanized Medievalism ; and thus he makes his Medley a 
mirror of the nineteenth century, possessed of its own new 
art and science, its own new temptations and aspirations, and 
yet grounded on, and continually striving to reproduce, the forms 
and experiences of all past time. The idea, too, of The Princess 
is an essentially modern one. In every age women have been 
tempted, by the possession of superior beauty, intellect, or strength 
of will, to deny their own womanhood, and attempt to stand alone 
as men, whether on the ground of political intrigue, ascetic saint- 
ship, or philosophic pride. Cleopatra and St. Hedwiga, Madame 
de Stael and the Princess, are merely different manifestations of 
the same self-willed and proud longing of woman to unsex herself, 
and realize, single and self-sustained, some distorted and partial 
notion of her own as to what the " angelic life " should be. 
Cleopatra acted out the pagan idea of an angel; St. Hedwiga, 
the mediaeval one ; Madame de Stael hers, with the peculiar 
notions of her time as to what " spirituel " might mean ; and in 
The Princess Mr. Tennyson has embodied the ideal of that 
nobler, wider, purer, yet equally fallacious, because equally unnat- 
ural analogue, which we may meet too often up and down England 
now. He shows us the woman, when she takes her stand on the 
false masculine ground of intellect, working out her own moral 
punishment, by destroying in herself the tender heart of flesh : not 
even her vast purposes of philanthropy can preserve her, for they 
are built up, not on the womanhood which God has given her, but 
on her own self-will ; they change, they fall, they become incon- 
sistent, even as she does herself, till at last, she loses all feminine 
sensibility ; scornfully and stupidly she rejects and misunderstands 
the heart of man ; and then falling from pride to sternness, from 
sternness to sheer inhumanity, she punishes sisterly love as a 
crime, robs the mother of her child, and becomes all but a venge- 



186 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

fal fury, with all the peculiar faults of woman, and none of the 
.peculiar excellences of man. 

The poem being, as its title imports, a medley of jest and 
earnest, allows a metrical license, of which we are often tempted 
to wish that its author had not availed himself; yet the most 
unmetrical and apparently careless passages flow with a grace, a 
lightness, a colloquial ease and frolic, which perhaps only heighten 
the effect of the serious parts, and serve as a foil to set off the 
unrivalled finish and melody of these latter. In these come out 
all Mr. Tennyson's instinctive choice of tone, his mastery of lan- 
guage, which always fits the right word to the right thing, and 
that word always the simplest one, and the perfect ear for melody 
which makes it superfluous to set to music poetry which, read by 
the veriest schoolboy, makes music of itself. The poem, we are 
glad to say, is so well-known that it seems unnecessary to quote 
from it ; yet there are here and there gems of sound and ex- 
pression of which, however well our readers may know them, we 
cannot forbear reminding them again. For instance, the end of 
the Idyl in book vii., beginning " Come down, O maid, " (the 
whole of which is perhaps one of the most perfect fruits of the 
poet's genius) : — 

Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, 
The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 
And murmuring of innumerable bees. 

Who, after three such lines, will talk of English as a harsh 
and clumsy language, and seek in the effeminate and monotonous 
Italian for expressive melody of sound ? Who cannot hear in 
them the rapid rippling of the water, the stately calmness of the 
wood-dove's note, and in the repetition of short syllables and 
soft liquids in the last line, the 

Murmuring of innumerable bees ? 

Or again, what extraordinary combination of richness with 
simplicity in such a passage as this : — 

Breathe upon my brows ; 
In that fine air I tremble, all the past 
Melts mist-like into this bright hour, and this 
I scarce believe, and all the rich to come 
Eeels, as the golden Autumn woodland reels 
Athwart the smoke of burning leaves. 

How Mr. Tennyson can have attained the prodigal fulness of 
thought and imagery which distinguishes this poem, and es- 
pecially the last canto, without his style ever becoming over- 
loaded, seldom even confused, is perhaps one of the greatest 



TENNYSON. 187 

marvels of the whole production. The songs themselves, which 
have been inserted between the cantos in the last edition of the 
book, seem, perfect as they are, wasted and smothered among 
the surrounding fertility; till we discover that they stand there, 
not merely for the sake of their intrinsic beauty, but serve to 
call back the reader's mind, at every pause in the tale of the 
princess's folly, to that very healthy ideal of womanhood which 
she has spurned. 

At the end of the first cantos, fresh from the description of the 
female college, with its professoresses, and hostleresses, and other 
Utopian monsters, we turn the page ; and — 

As through the land at eve we went, 

And pluck' d the ripen' d ears, 
We fell out, my wife and I, 

And kiss'd again with tears: 

And blessings on the falling-out 

That all the more endears, 
When we fall out with those we love, 

And kiss again with tears ! 

For when we came where lies the child 

We lost in other years, 
There above the little grave, 

We kiss'd again with tears. 

Between the next two cantos intervenes a cradle song, so ex- 
quisite that we must ask leave to quote it also : — 

Sweet and low, sweet and low, 

Wind of the western sea, 
Low, low, breathe and blow, 

Wind of the western sea ! 
Over the rolling waters go, 
Come from the dropping moon, and blow, 

Blow him again to me ; 
While my little one, while my pretty one sleeps. 

Sleep and rest, sleep and rest, 

Father will come to thee soon ; 
Rest, rest, on mother's breast, 

Father will come to thee soon ; 
Father will come to his babe in the nest, 
Silver sails all out of the west 

Under the silver moon : 
Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep. 

At the next interval is the wonderful bugle-song, the idea of 
which is that of twin-labour and twin-fame, in a pair of lovers. 

Our echoes roll from soul to soul, 
And grow forever and forever. 

In the next, the memory of wife and child inspirits the soldier 



188 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

in the field ; in the next, the sight of the fallen hero's child open 
the sluices of his widow's tears ; and in the last, and perhaps the 
most beautiful of all, the poet has succeeded, in the new edition, 
in superadding a new form of emotion to a canto in which he 
seemed to have exhausted every resource of pathos which his 
subject allowed ; and prepares us for the triumph of that art by 
which he makes us, after all, love the heroine whom he at first 
taught us to hate and despise, till we see that her naughtiness is 
after all one that must be kissed and not whipped out of her, and 
look on smiling while she repents, with Prince Harry of old, 
" not in sackcloth and ashes, but in new silk and old sack : " — 

Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea; 

The cloud may stoop from Heaven and take the shape, 

With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape ; 
But, too fond, when have I answer'd thee? 
Ask me no more. 

Ask me no more : what answer should I give ? 

I love not hollow cheek or faded eye: 

Yet, my friend, I will not have thee die ! 
Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live; 
Ask me no more. 

Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal'd: 

I strove against the stream and all in vain : 

Let the great river take me to the main : 
No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield ; 
Ask me no more. 

We now come to the first of the volumes whose names stand 
at the head of our article — In Memoriam ; a collection of poems 
on a vast variety of subjects, but all united as their name implies, 
to the memory of a departed friend. We know not whether to 
envy more — the poet the object of his admiration, or that object 
the monument which has been consecrated to his nobleness. For 
in this latest and highest volume, written at various intervals 
during a long series of years, all the poet's peculiar excellences, 
with all that he has acquired from others, seem to have been 
fused down into a perfect unity, and brought to bear on his sub- 
ject with that care and finish which only a labour of love can 
inspire. We only now know the whole man, all his art, all his 
insight, all his faculty of discerning the piu nelV uno, and the uno 
nelV piu. As he says himself: — 

My love has talked with rocks and trees, 

He finds on misty mountain-ground. 

His own vast shadow glory-crowned; 
He sees himself in all he sees. 

Everything reminds him of the dead. Every joy or sorrow of 
man, every aspect of nature, from 



TENNYSON. 189 

The forest crack' d, the waters curl'd, 

The cattle huddled on the lea, 
to 

The thousand waves of wheat 
That ripple round the lonely grange. 

In every place where in old days they had met and conversed ; 
in every dark wrestling of the spirit with the doubts and fears of 
manhood, throughout the whole outward universe of nature, and 
the whole inward universe of spirit, the soul of his dead friend 
broods — at first a memory shrouded in blank despair, then a 
living presence, a ministering spirit, answering doubts, calming 
fears, stirring up noble aspirations, utter humility, leading the 
poet upward step by step to faith, and peace, and hope. Not 
that there runs throughout the book a conscious or organic 
method. The poems seem often merely to be united by the 
identity of their metre, so exquisitely chosen, that while the 
major rhyme in the second and third lines of each stanza gives 
the solidity and self-restraint required by such deep themes, the 
mournful minor rhyme of each first and fourth line always leads 
the ear to expect something beyond, and enables the poet's 
thoughts to wander sadly on, from stanza to stanza and poem to 
poem, in an endless chain of 

Linked sweetness long drawn out. 

There are records of risings and fallings again, of alternate 
cloud and sunshine, throughout the book ; earnest and passionate, 
yet never bitter ; humble, yet never abject ; with a depth and. 
vehemence of affection " passing the love of woman," yet without 
a taint of sentimentality; self-restrained and dignified, without 
ever narrowing into artificial coldness ; altogether rivalling the 
sonnets of Shakspeare. — Why should we not say boldly, sur- 
passing — for the sake of the superior faith into which it rises, 
for the sake of the proem at the opening of the volume — in our 
eyes, the noblest English Christian poem which several centuries 
have seen ? 

But we must quote, and let the poet tell his own tale ; though 
the very poems which we should most wish to transcribe are just 
those about which we feel a delicacy, perhaps morbid, in dis- 
secting critically before the public eye. They are fit only to be 
read solemnly in our purest and most thoughtful moods, in the 
solitude of our chamber, or by the side of those we love, with 
thanks to the great heart who has taken courage to bestow on 
us the record of his own love, doubt, and triumph. 

We shall make no comments on our extracts. It were an 
injustice to the poet to think they needed any. 



190 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 



I sometimes hold it half a»sin 
To put in words the grief I feel ; 
For words, like nature, half reveal 

And half conceal the Soul within. 

But, for the unquiet heart and brain, 
A use in measur'd language lies; 
The sad mechanic exercise 

Like dull narcotics, numbing pain. 

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er 
Like coarsest clothes against the cold ; 
But that large grief which these enfold 

Is given in outline and no more. 

XIX. 

The Danube to the Severn gave 

The darken' d heart that beat no more ; 
They laid nim by the pleasant shore, 

And in the hearing of the wave. 

There twice a-day the Severn fills; 
The salt sea-water passes by, 
And hushes half the babbling Wye, 

And makes a silence in the hills. 

The Wye is hush'd nor moved along; 
And hush'd my deepest grief of all, 
When fill'd with tears that cannot fall, 

I brim with sorrow drowning song. 

The tide flows down, the wave again 
Is vocal in its wooded walls : 
My deeper anguish also falls, 

And I can speak a little then. 



" He past ; a soul of nobler tone : 

My spirit loved and loves him yet, 
Like some poor girl whose heart is set 
On one whose rank exceeds her own. 

He mixing with his proper sphere, 
She finds the baseness of her lot; 
Half jealous of she knows not what, 

And envying all that meet him there. 

The little village looks forlorn; 
She sighs amid her narrow days, 
Moving about the household ways, 

In that dark house where she was "born. 

The foolish neighbours come and go, 
And tease her till the day draws by ; 
At night she weeps, " How vain am I! 

How should he love a thing so low? " 



I cannot see the features right, 

When on the gloom I strive to paint 
The face I know; the hues are faint, 

And mix with hollow masks of night: 



TENNYSON. 191 



Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought, 
A gulf that ever shuts and gapes, 
A hand that points, and palled shapes 

In shadowy thoroughfares of thought ; 

And crowds that stream from narrow doors, 
And shoals of pucker' d faces drive; 
Dark bulks that tumble half alive, 

And lazy lengths on boundless shores ; 

Till all at once beyond the will 
I hear a wizard music roll, 
And through a lattice on the soul 

Looks thy fair face and makes it still. 



Sweet after showers, ambrosial air, 
That rollest from the gorgeous gloom 
Of evening over brake and bloom 

And meadow, slowly breathing bare 

The round of space, and rapt below 
Through all the dewy-tassell'd wood, 
And shadowing down the horned flood 

In ripples, fan my brows and blow 

The fever from my cheek, and sigh 
The full new life that feeds the breath 
Throughout my frame, till doubt and death, 

111 brethren, let the faDcy fly 

From belt to belt of crimson seas 
On leagues of odour streaming far, 
To where in yonder Orient star 

A hundred spirits whisper " Peace." 

LXXXVI. 

Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet, 
Rings Eden through the budded quicks, 

tell me where the senses mix, 

tell me where the passions meet, 

Whence radiate : fierce extremes employ 
Thy spirits in the dusking leaf, 
And in the midmost heart of grief 

Thy passion clasps a secret jo}': 

And I — my harp would prelude woe — 

1 cannot all command the strings ; 
The glory of the sum of things 

Will flash along the chords and go. 

xci. 

1 shall not see thee. Dare I say 
No spirit ever broke the band 

That stays him from the native land, 
Where first he walk'd when clasp t in clay V 

No visual shade of some one lost, 
But he, the Spirit himself, may come 
Where all the nerve of sense is numb ; 

Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost. 



192 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

0, therefore from thy sightless range 
With God in nnconjectured bliss, 
0, from the distance of the ab}^ss 

Of tenfold-complicated change, 

Descend, and touch, and enter; hear 
The wish too strong for words to name ; 
That in this blindness of the frame 

My Ghost may feel that thine is near. 

XCIX. 

Un watch' d the garden bough shall sway, 
The tender blossom nutter down, 
Unloved that beech will gather brown, 

This maple burn itself away ; 

Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair, 
Ray round with flames her disk of seed, 
And many a rose-carnation feed 

With summer spice the humming air ; 

Unloved, by many a sandy bar, 

The brook shall babble down the plain, 
At noon or when the lesser wain 

Is twisting round the polar star; 

Uncared for, gird the windy grove, 

And flood the haunts of hern and crake ; 
Or into silver arrows break 

The sailing moon in creek and cove ; 

Till, from the garden and the wild 
A fresh association blow, 
And year by year the landscape grow 

Familiar to the stranger's child; 

As year by year the labourer tills 
His wonted glebe, or lops the glades; 
And year by year our memory fades 

From all the circle of the hills. 



Ring out wild bells, to the wild sky, 
The flying cloud, the frosty light ; 
The year is dying in the night; 

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. 

Ring out the old, ring in the new, 
Ring, happy bells, across the snow : 
The year is going, let him go; 

Ring out the false, ring in the true. 

Ring out the grief that saps the mind, 
For those that here we see no more 
Ring out the feud of rich and poor, 

Ring in redress to all mankind. . 

Ring out a slowly dying cause, 
And ancient forms of party strife; 
Ring in the nobler modes of life, 

W ith sweeter manners, purer laws. 



TENNYSON. 193 

Ring out the want, the care, the sin, 

The faithless coldness of the times ; 

Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, 
But ring the fuller minstrel in. 

Ring out false pride in place and blood, 

The civic slander and the spite; 

Ring in the love of truth and right, 
Ring in the common love of good. 

Ring out old shapes of foul disease, 

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; 

Ring out the thousand wars of old, 
Ring in the thousand years of peace. 

Ring in the valiant man and free, 

The larger heart, the kindlier hand; 

Ring out the darkness of the land, 
Ring in the Christ that is to be. 

CX VI. 

Contemplate all this work of time, 

The giant labouring in his youth; 

Nor dream of human love and truth, 
As dying Nature's earth and lime; 

But trust that those we call the dead, 

Are breathers of an ampler day 

For ever nobler ends. They say, 
The solid earth whereon we tread 

In tracts of fluent heat began, 

And grew to seeming-random forms, 

The seeming prey of cyclic storms, 
Till at the last arose the man ; 

Who throve and branch' d from clime to clime, 

The herald of a higher race, 

And of himself in higher place, 
If so he type this work of time 

Within himself, from more to more; 

Or, crown' d with attributes of woe, 

Like glories, move his course, and show 
That life is not an idle ore, 

But iron dug from central gloom, 

And heated hot with burning fears, 

And dipp'd in baths of hissing tears, 
And batter' d with the shocks of doom 

To shape and use. Arise and fly 

The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; 

Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die. 

CXXVII. 

Dear friend, far off, my lost desire, 

So far, so near in woe and weal; 

0, loved the most when I must feel 
There is a lower and a higher ; 
9 



194 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Known, and unknown, human, divine! 

Sweet human hand and lips and eye, 

Dear heavenly friend that canst not die, 
Mine, mine, forever, ever mine 1 

Strange friend, past, present, and to be, 

Loved deeplier, darklier understood ; 

Behold I dream a dream of good, 
And mingle all the world with thee. 

CXXIX. 

living will that shalt endure 

When all that seems shall suffer shock, 

Eise in the spiritual rock, 
Flow through our deeds and make them pure, 

That we may lift from out the dust 

A voice as unto him that hears, 

A cry above the conquer' d years 
To one that with us works, and trust 

With faith that comes of self-control", 

The truths that never can be proved 

Until we close with all we loved, 
And all we flow from, soul in soul. 

From the proem, or from the exquisite epithalamium at the 
end of the volume, we shall not quote ; they are too long to be 
inserted at length, and too perfect wholes for us to mar them by 
any curtailment. 

It has been often asked why Mr. Tennyson's great and varied 
powers had never been concentrated on one immortal work. The 
epic, the lyric, the idyllic faculties, perhaps the dramatic also, 
seemed to be all there, and yet all sundered, scattered about in 
small fragmentary poems. In Memoriarn, as we think, explains 
the paradox. Mr. Tennyson could not write an epos or a drama 
while he was living one. It was true, as people said, that his 
secluded habits had shut him out from that knowledge of human 
character necessary for the popular dramatist ; but he had been 
talking all the while with angels. Within the unseen world which 
underlies and explains this mere time-shadow, which men call 
Reality and Fact, he had been going down into the depths, and 
ascending into the heights, led, like Dante of old, by the guiding 
of a mighty spirit. And in this volume, the record of seventeen 
years, we have the result of those spiritual experiences in a form 
calculated, as we believe, to be a priceless benefit tQ many an 
earnest seeker in this generation, and perhaps to stir up some 
who are priding themselves on a cold dilettantism and barren 
epicurism, into something like a living faith and hope. Blessed 
and delightful it is to find, that even in these new ages the creeds 
which so many fancy to be at their last gasp, are still the final 
and highest succour, not merely of the peasant and the outcast. 



TENNYSON. 195 

but of the subtle artist and the daring speculator ! Blessed it is 
to find the most cunning poet of our day able to combine the 
complicated rhythm and melody of modern times with the old 
truths which gave heart to martyrs at the stake, to see in the 
science and the history of the nineteenth century new and living 
fulfilments of the words which we learnt at our mothers' knee ! 
Blessed, thrice blessed, to find that hero-worship is not yet passed 
away ; that the heart of man still beats young and fresh ; that 
the old tales of David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, So- 
crates and Alcibiades, Shakspeare and his nameless friend, of 
" love passing the love of woman," ennobled by its own humility, 
deeper than death, and mightier than the grave, can still blossom 
out if it be but in one heart here and there to show men still 
how sooner or later " he that loveth knoweth God, for God is 
Love ! " 



196 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 



THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY 

ART. 

[Fraser's Magazine.'] 

Much attention has been excited this year (1849) by the 
alleged fulfilment of a prophecy that the Papal power was to 
receive its death-blow — -in temporal matters, at least — -during the 
past year 1848. For ourselves, we have no more faith in Mr. 
Fleming, the obsolete author, who has so suddenly revived in the 
public esteem, than we have in other interpreters of prophecy. 
Their shallow and bigoted views of past history are enough to 
damp our faith in their discernment of the future. It does seem 
that people ought to understand what has been, before they pre- 
dict what will be. History is "the track of God's footsteps 
through time ; " it is in his dealings with our forefathers that we 
may expect to find the laws by which he will deal with us. Not 
that Mr. Fleming's conjecture must be false ; among a thousand 
guesses there ought surely to be one right one. And it is almost 
impossible for earnest men to bend their whole minds, however 
clumsily, to one branch of study without arriving at some truth 
or other. The interpreters of prophecy, therefore, like all other 
interpreters, have our best wishes, though not our sanguine hopes. 
But, in the mean time, there are surely signs of the approaching 
ruin of Popery, more certain than any speculations on the mys- 
tic numbers of the Revelation. We should point to recent books, 
— not to books which merely expose Rome, — that has been done 
long ago, usque ad nauseam, — but to books which do her justice, 
^to Mr. Maitland's Dark Ages ; Lord Lindsay's Christian Art ; 
Mr. Macaulay's new History of England ; and last, but not least, 
to the very charming book of Mrs. Jameson, whose title heads 
this review. In them and in a host of similar works in Germany, 
which Dr. Wiseman's party hail as signs of coming triumph, we 

Sacred and Legendary Art. By Mrs. Jameson. 



THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 197 

fancy we see the death-warrant of Romanism ; because they 
prove that Rome has nearly done her work,-— that the Protestants 
are learning the lesson for the sake of which Providence has so 
long borne with that monstrous system. When Popery has no 
more truth to teach us, (and it certainly has not much,) but not 
till then, will it vanish away into its native night. 

We entreat Protestant readers not to be alarmed at us. We 
have not the slightest tendency toward the stimulants of Popery, 
either in their Roman unmixed state, or in their Oxford form, 
diluted with much cold water and no sugar. We are, with all 
humility, more Protestant than Protestantism itself; our fastidi- 
ous nostril, more sensitive of Jesuits than even those of the 
author of Hawkstone, has led us at moments to fancy that we 
scent indulgences in Conduit Street Chapel, and discern inquisi- 
tors in Exeter Hall itself. Seriously, none believe more firmly 
than ourselves that the cause of Protestantism is the cause of lib- 
erty, of civilization, of truth ; the cause of man and God. And 
because we think Mrs. Jameson's book especially Protestant, both 
in manner and intention, and likely to do service to the good 
cause, we are setting to work herein to praise and recommend it. 
For the time, we think, for calling Popery ill names is past; 
though to abstain is certainly sometimes a sore restraint for 
English spirits, as Mrs. Jameson herself, we suspect, has found ; 
but Romanism has been exposed, and refuted triumphantly, every 
month for centuries, and yet the Romish nations are not con- 
verted ; and too many English families of late have found, by 
sad experience, that such arguments as are in vogue are power- 
less to dissuade the young from rushing headlong into the very 
superstitions which they have been taught from their childhood 
to deride. The truth is, Protestantism may well cry, " Save me 
from my friends ! " We have attacked Rome too often on shal- 
low grounds, and finding our arguments weak, have found it 
necessary to overstate them. We have got angry, and caught up 
the first weapon which came to hand, and have only cut our own 
fingers. We have very nearly burnt the Church of England 
over our [heads, in our hurry to make a bonfire of the Pope. 
We have been too proud to make ourselves acquainted with the 
very tenets which we exposed, and have made a merit of read- 
ing no Popish books but such as we were sure would give us a 
handle for attack, and not even them without the precaution of 
getting into a safe passion beforehand. We have dealt in exag- 
gerations, in special pleadings, in vile and reckless imputations of 
motive, in suppressions of all palliating facts. We have outraged 
the common feelings of humanity by remaining blind to the vir- 
tues of noble and holy men because they were Papists, as if a 



198 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

good deed was not good in Italy as well as England. We have 
talked as if God had doomed to hopeless vileness in this world, 
and reprobation in the next, millions of Christian people, simply 
because they were born of Romish and not of Protestant fathers. 
And we have our reward ; we have fared like the old woman 
who would not tell the children what a well was for fear they 
should fall into one. We see educated and pious Englishmen 
joining the Romish communion simply from ignorance of Rome, 
and have no talisman wherewith to disenchant them. Our medi- 
cines produce no effect on them, and all we can do is, like quacks, 
to increase the dose. Of course if ten boxes of Morison's pills 
have killed a man, it only proves that — he ought to have taken 
twelve of them. We are jesting, but, as an Ulster Orangeman 
would say, " it is in good Protestant earnest." 

To return. In the mean time some of the deepest cravings of 
the human heart have been left utterly unsatisfied. And be it 
remembered, that such universal cravings are more than fancies ; 
they are indications of deep spiritual wants, which, unless we 
supply them with the good food which God has made for them, 
will supply themselves with poison, — indications of spiritual facul- 
ties, which it is as wicked to stunt or distort by miseducation as 
it is to maim our own limbs or stupefy our understanding. Our 
humanity is an awful and divine gift ; our business is to educate 
it throughout — God alone must judge which part of it shall pre- 
ponderate over the rest. But in the last generation — and, alas ! 
in this also — little or no proper care has been taken of the love 
for all which is romantic, marvellous, heroic, which exists in 
every ingenuous child. Schoolboys, indeed, might, if they chose, 
in play-hours, gloat over the Seven Champions of Christendom, 
or Lempriere's gods and goddesses ; girls might, perhaps, be 
allowed to devour by stealth a few fairy tales, or the Arabian 
Nights ; but it was only by connivance that their longings were 
satisfied from the scraps of Moslemism, Paganism, — anywhere 
but from Christianity. Protestantism had nothing to do with the 
imagination, — in fact, it was a question whether reasonable peo- 
ple ^had any ; whether the devil was not the original maker of 
that troublesome faculty in man, woman, and child. Poetry 
itself was, with most parents, a dram, to be given, like Dalby's 
Carminative, as a pis aller, when children could not possibly be 
kept quiet by Miss Edgeworth or Mrs. Mangnall. Then, as the 
children grew up, and began to know something of history and 
art, two still higher cravings began to seize on many of them, if 
they were at all of deep and earnest character : a desire to asso- 
ciate with religion their new love for the beautiful, and a rever- 
ence for antiquity ; a wish to find some bond of union between 



THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 199 

themselves and the fifteen centuries of Christianity which elapsed 
before the Reformation. They applied to Protestant teachers 
and Protestant books, and received too often the answer that " the 
Gospel had nothing to do with art, — art was either Pagan or 
Popish ; " and as for " the centuries before the Reformation, they 
and all in them belonged utterly to darkness and the pit." As for 
" the heroes of early Christianity, they were madmen or humbugs ; 
their legends devilish and filthy puerilities." They went to the 
artists and literary men, and received the same answer. " The 
mediaeval writers were fools. Classical art was the only art ; 
all painters before the age of Raphael superstitious bunglers. To 
be sure, as Fuseli said, Christianity had helped art a little ; " but 
then it was the Christianity of " Julio and Leone," — in short of 
the worst age of Popery. 

These falsehoods have worked out their own punishment. The 
young are examining for themselves, and finding that we have 
deceived them, a revulsion in their feelings has taken place, 
similar to that which took place in Germany some half-century- 
ago. They are reading the histories of the middle ages, and if 
we call them barbarous — they will grant it, and then quote in- 
stances of individual heroism and piety, which they defy us or 
any honest man not to admire. They are reading the old legends, 
and when we call them superstitious — they grant it, and then 
produce passages in which the highest doctrines of Christianity 
are embodied in the most pathetic and noble stories. They are 
looking for themselves at the ante-Raphaellic artists, and when 
we tell them that Fra Angelico's pictures are weak, affected, ill- 
drawn, ill-coloured, — they grant it, and then ask us if we can 
deny the sweetness, the purity, the rapt devotion, the saintly vir- 
tue, which shines forth from his faces. They ask us how beautiful 
and holy words or figures can be inspired by an evil spirit. 
They ask us why they are to deny the excellence of tales and 
pictures which make men more pure and humble, more earnest 
and noble. They tell us truly that all beauty is God's stamp, 
and that all beauty ought to be consecrated to his service. And 
then they ask us, " If Protestantism denies that she can consecrate 
the beautiful, how can you wonoler if we love the Romanism 
which can ? You say that Popery created these glorious schools 
of art : how can you wonder if, like Overbeck, " we take the 
faith for the sake of the art which it inspired ? " 

To all which, be it true or false, (and it is both,) are we to 
answer merely by shutting our eyes and ears tight, and yelling 
" No Popery I " or are we to say boldly to them, " We confess 
ourselves in fault ; we sympathize with your longings ; we con- 
fess that Protestantism has not satisfied them ; but we assert thaf 



200 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

the only cause is, that Protestantism has not been true to her- 
self; that Art, like every other product of the free human spirit, 
is her domain, and not Popery's ; that these legends, these pic- 
tures, are beautiful just in as far as they contain in them the 
germs of those eternal truths about man, nature, and God, which 
the Reformation delivered from bondage ; that you can admire 
them, and yet remain thorough Protestants ; and more, that un- 
less you do remain Protestants, you will never enter into their 
full beauty and significance, because you will lose sight of those 
very facts and ideas from which they derive all their healthy 
power over you ? " 

These thoughts are not our own ; they are uttered all over 
England, thank God ! just now, by many voices and in many 
forms : if they had been boldly spoken during the last fifteen 
years, many a noble spirit, we believe, might have remained in 
the Church of its fathers which has now taken refuge in Roman- 
ism from the fruits of miseducation. One great reason why 
Romanism has been suffered to drag on its existence is, we hum- 
bly think, that it might force us at last to say this. We have 
been long learning the lesson ; till we have learned it thoroughly 
Romanism will exist, and we shall never be safe from its allure- 
ments. 

These thoughts may help to explain our opening sentences, as 
well as the extreme pleasure with which we hail the appearance 
of Mrs. Jameson's work. • 

The authoress has been struck, during her examination of the 
works of Christian artists, with the extreme ignorance which 
prevails in England on the subjects which they portray. 

We have had (she says, in an introduction, every word of 
which we recommend as replete with the truest Christian philos- 
ophy)— 

" Inquiries into the principles of taste, treatises on the sublime and 
beautiful, anecdotes of painting, and we abound in antiquarian essays 
on disputed pictures and mutilated statues ; but up to a late period 
any inquiry into the true spirit and significance of works of art, as 
connected with the history of religion and civilization, would have 
appeared ridiculous, or, perhaps, dangerous. We should have had 
another cry of ' No Popery ! ' and Acts of Parliament prohibiting the 
importation of saints and Madonnas." — P. xxi. 

And what should we have gained by it, but more ignorance of 
the excuses for Popery, and, therefore, of its real dangers ? If 
Protestantism be the truth, knowledge of whatsoever kind can 
only further it. We have found it so in the case of classical liter- 
ature. Why should we strain at a gnat and swallow a camel ? 
Our boys have not taken to worshipping Jupiter and Juno by 



THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 201 

reading about them. We never feared that they would. We 
knew that we should not make them pagans by teaching them 
justly to admire the poetry, the philosophy, the personal virtues 
of pagans. And, in fact, the few who since the revival of letters 
have deserted Christianity for what they called philosophic hea- 
thenism, have in almost every case sympathized, not with the 
excellences, but with the worst vices of the Greek and Roman. 
They have been men like Leo X. or the Medici, who, ready to 
be profligates under any religion, found in heathenism only an 
excuse for their darling sins. The same will be the fruits of 
a real understanding of the mediaeval religion. It will only en- 
danger those who carried already the danger in themselves, and 
would have fallen into some other snare if this had been away. 
Why should we fancy that Protestantism, like the Romanism 
which it opposes, is a plant that will not bear the light, and can 
only be protected at the expense of the knowledge of facts ? 
Why will we forget the great spiritual law which Mrs. Jameson 
and others in these days are fully recognizing, that " we cannot 
safely combat the errors of any man or system without first giv- 
ing them full credit for whatever excellences they may retain ? " 
Such a course is the true fruit of that free spirit of Protestantism 
which ought to delight in recognizing good to whatever party it 
may belong ; which asserts that every good gift and perfect gift 
comes directly from above, and not through the channel of par- 
ticular formularies or priesthoods ; which, because it loves faith 
and virtue for their own sakes, and not as mere parts of a 
" Catholic system," can recognize them and delight in them 
wherever it finds them. 

" Upon these creations of ancmt art (as Mrs. Jameson says) we 
cannot look as those did for whom they were created ; we cannot anni- 
hilate the centuries which lie between us and them ; we cannot, in 
simplicity of heart, forget the artist in the image he has placed before 
us, nor supply what may be deficient s in. his work through a reveren- 
tially excited fancy. We are critical, not credulous. We no longer 
accept this polytheistic form of Christianity ; and there is little danger, 
I suppose, of our falling again into the strange excesses of superstition 
to which it led. But if I have not much sympathy with modern imita- 
tions of mediaeval art, still less can I sympathize with that narrow puri- 
tanical jealousy which holds the monuments of a real and earnest faith 
in contempt : all that God has permitted to exist oijce in the past should 
be considered as the possession of the present ; saeredfor example or 
warning, and held as the foundation on which to build up what is bet- 
ter and purer." — Introd. p. xx. 

Mrs. Jameson here speaks in the name of a large and rapidly 
increasing class. The craving for religious art, of which we 
spoke above, is spreading far and wide ; even in dissenting 

9* 



202 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

chapels we see occasional attempts at architectural splendour, 
which would have been considered twenty years ago heretic or 
idolatrous. And yet with all this there is, as Mrs. Jameson says, 
a curious ignorance with regard to the subject of mediaeval art, 
even though it has now become a reigning fashion among us. 

" We have learned, perhaps, after running through half the galleries 
and churches in Europe, to distinguish a few of the attributes and 
characteristic figures which meet us at every turn, yet without any 
clear idea of their meaning, derivation, or relative propriety. The 
palm of victory, we know, designates the martyr, triumphant in death. 
We so far emulate the critical sagacity of the gardener in Zeluco, that 
we have learned to distinguish St. Laurence by his gridiron, and St. 
Catherine by her wheel. We are not at a loss to recognize the Magda- 
lene's ' loose hair and lifted eye,' even when without her skull and her 
vase of ointment. We learn to know St. Francis by his brown habit, 
and shaven crown, and wasted, ardent features ; but how do we dis- 
tinguish him from St. Anthony, or St. Dominick ? As for St. George 
and the dragon — from the St. George of the Louvre — Raphael's — who 
sits his horse with the elegant tranquillity of one assured of celestial 
aid, down to him ' who swings on a sign-post at mine hostess's door,' — 
he is our familiar acquaintance. But who is that lovely being in the 
first blush of youth, who, bearing aloft the symbolic cross, stands with 
one foot on the vanquished dragon ? 4 That is a copy after Raphael.' 
And who is that majestic creature holding her palm branch, while the 
unicorn crouches at her feet ? ' That is the famous Moretto at Vienna.' 
Are we satisfied ?• Not in the least ! but we try to look wiser, and 
pass on. 

" In the old times, the painters of these legendary scenes and sub- 
jects could always reckon securely on certain associations and certain 
sympathies in the minds of the spectators. We have outgrown these 
associations, we repudiate these sympathies. We have taken these 
works from their consecrated localities, in which they once held each 
their dedicated place, and we have hung them in our drawing-rooms 
and our dressing-rooms, over our pianos and our sideboards, and now 
what do they say to us ? That Magdelene, weeping amid her hair, 
who once spoke comfort to the soul of the fallen sinner, — that Sebas- 
tian, arrow-pierced, whose upward, ardent glance, spoke of courage 
and hope to the tyrant-ridden serf, — that poor tortured slave, to whose 
aid St. Mark comes sweeping down from above, — can they speak to us 
of nothing save flowing lines, and correct drawing, and gorgeous col- 
our ? Must we be told that one is a Titian, the other a Guido, the 
third a Tintoret, before we dare to melt in compassion or admiration ? 
or the moment we refer to their ancient religious signification and in- 
fluence, must it be with disdain or with pity ? This, as it appears to me, 
is to take not a rational, but rather a most irrational, as well as a most 
irreverent, view of the question : it is to confine the pleasure and im- 
provement to be derived from works of art within very narrow bounds ; 
it is to seal up a fountain of the richest poetry, and to shut out a thou- 
sand ennobling and inspiring thoughts. Happily there is a growing 
appreciation of these larger principles of criticism as applied to the 



THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 203 

study of art. People look at the pictures which hang around their 
walls, and have an awakening suspicion that there is more in them 
than meets the eve, — more than mere connoisseurship can interpret ; 
and that they have another, a deeper significance than has been 
dreamed of by picture dealers and picture collectors, or even picture 
critics." — Introd. p. xxiii. 

On these grounds Mrs. Jameson treats of the Poetry of Sacred 
and Legendary Art. Her first volume contains a general sketch 
of the legends connected with angels, with the scriptural person- 
ages, and the primitive fathers. Her second, the histories of 
most of " those sainted personages who lived, or are supposed 
to have lived, in the first ages of Christianity, and whose real 
history, founded on fact or tradition, has been so disfigured by 
poetical embroidery that they have in some sort the air of ideal 
beings." Each story is followed by a series of short, but brilliant, 
criticisms on those pictures in which the story has been embodied 
by painters of various schools and periods, and illustrated by 
numerous spirited etchings and woodcuts, which add greatly to 
the value and intelligibility of the work. A future volume is 
promised which shall contain the u legends of the monastic orders, 
and the history of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, considered 
merely in their connection with the revival and the development 
of the fine arts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ; " — a 
work which, if it equal the one before us, will doubtless be hailed 
by those conversant with that wonderful phase of human history 
as a valuable addition to our pschycologic and aesthetic literature. 

We ought to petition, also, for a volume which should contain 
the life of the Saviour, and the legends of the Virgin Mary ; 
though this latter subject, we are afraid, will be too difficult for 
even Mrs. Jameson's tact and delicacy to make tolerable to 
English readers, so thoroughly has the Virgin Many, as especial 
patroness of purity, been intermixed, as a matter of course, in 
her legends, with every form of prudish and prurient foulminded- 
ness. 

The authoress has wisely abstained from all controversial mat- 
ter.-. In her preface she begs that it may be clearly understood, 
" that she has taken throughout the aesthetic and not the religious 
view of these productions of art ; which, in as far as they are in- 
formed with a true and earnest feeling, and steeped in that beauty 
which emanates from Genius inspired by Faith, may cease to be 
religion, but cannot cease to be poetry ; and as poetry only," she 
says, " I have considered them." In a word, Mrs. Jameson has 
done for them what schoolmasters and schoolboys, bishops and 
Royal Academicians, have been doing for centuries, by Greek 
plays and Greek statues, without having incurred, as we said 



204 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

above, the slightest suspicion of wanting to worship heathen gods 
and goddesses. 

Not that she views these stories with the cold, unbelieving eye 
of a Goethe, merely as studies of " artistic effect ; " she often 
transgresses her rule of impartiality, and just wdiere we should 
wish her to do so. Her geniality cannot avoid an occasional 
burst of feeling, such as concludes her notice of the stories about 
the Magdalene and the other " beatified penitents." 

" Poets have sung, and moralists and sages have taught, that for the 
frail woman there was nothing left but to die ; or if more remained for 
her to suffer, there was at least nothing left for her to be or do, — no 
choice between sackcloth and ashes and the livery of sin. The beatified 
penitents of the early Christian Church spoke another lesson, — spoke 
divinely of hope for the fallen, hope without self-abasement or defi- 
ance. We, in these days, acknowledge no such saints ; we have even 
done our best to dethrone Mary Magdalene ; but we have martyrs, — 
'by the pang without the palm,' — and one, at least, among these who has 
not died without lifting up a voice of eloquent and solemn warning ; 
who has borne her palm on earth, and whose starry crown may be 
seen on high even now amid the constellations of Genius." — Vol. ii. 
p. 386. 

To whom the authoress may allude in this touching passage 
our simplicity cannot guess in the least. We. may, therefore, 
without the suspicion of partiality, say to the noble spirit of 
purity, compassion, and true liberality wdiich breathes throughout 
this whole chapter, " Go on and conquer." 

Nor again can Mrs. Jameson's English honesty avoid an occa- 
sional slip of delicate sarcasm ; for instance, in the story of St. 
Filomena, a bran-new saint, whose discovery at Rome in 1802 
produced there an excitement which we should suspect was very 
much wanted, and which we recommend to all our readers as an 
instance of the state into which the virtues of honesty and com- 
mon sense seem to have fallen in the Eternal City — of humbugs. 

No doubt there are many such cases of imposture among the 
list of saints and martyrs : yet, granting all which have been 
exposed, and more, there still remains a list of authentic stories, 
sadder and stranger than any romance of man's invention, to read 
which without deep sympathy and admiration our hearts must be 
callous or bigoted indeed. As Mrs. Jameson herself well says 
(vol. ii. p. 137) : — 

" When in the daily service of our Church we repeat these words of 
the sublime hymn ('The noble army of martyrs praise Thee ! '), 1 won- 
der sometimes whether it be with a full appreciation of their meaning ? 
whether we do really reflect on all that this noble army of martyrs has 
conquered for us ? Did they indeed glorify God through their cour- 
age, and seal their faith in their Redeemer with their blood ? And if 



THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 205 

it be so, how is it that we Christians have learned to look coldly upon 
the effigies of those who sowed the seed of the harvest which we have 
reaped ? — Sanguis martyrum semen Cliristianorum ! We may admit 
that the reverence paid to them in former days was unreasonable and 
excessive ; that credulity and ignorance have in many instances falsi- 
fied the actions imputed to them ; that enthusiasm has magnified their 
numbers beyond all belief; that when the communion with martyrs 
was associated with the presence of their material remains, the passion 
for relics led to a thousand abuses, and the belief in their intercession 
to a thousand superstitions. But why, in uprooting the false, uproot 
also the beautiful and the true ? " 

Thoroughly and practically convinced as we are of the truth of 
these words, it gave us some pain when, in the work of a very 
worthy person, The Church in the Catacombs, by Dr. Maitland 
(not the author of The Dark Ages), we found, as far as we could 
perceive, a wish u to advance the Protestant cause " by throwing 
general doubt on the old martyrologies and their monuments in 
the Roman catacombs. If we shall have judged hastily, we shall 
be ready to apologize. None, as we have said before, more firmly 
believe that the Protestant cause is the good cause ; none are 
more reverentially inclined toward all honest critical investiga- 
tions, more anxious to see all truth, the Bible itself, sifted and 
tested in every possible method ; but we must protest against 
what certainly seemed too contemptuous a rejection of a mass of 
historic evidence hitherto undoubted, except by the school of 
Voltaire, and of the hasty denial of the meaning of Christian 
and martyrologic symbols, as well known to antiquaries as Stone- 
henge or Magna Charta. 

At the same time, Dr. Maitland's book seems the work of a 
righteous and earnest man, and it is not its object, but its method, 
of which we complain. The whole question of martyrology, a 
far more important one than historians generally fancy, requires 
a thorough investigation, critical and historical ; it has to be done, 
and especially just uoav. The Germans, the civil engineers of 
the intellectual world, ought to do it for us, and no doubt will. 
But those who undertake it must bring to the work, not only im- 
partiality, but enthusiasm ; it is the spirit only, after all, which 
can quicken the eye, which can free the understanding from the 
idols of laziness, prejudice, and 'hasty induction. To talk philo- 
sophically of such matters a man must love them ; he must set 
to work with a Christian sympathy, and a manly admiration for 
those old spiritual heroes to whose virtue and endurance Europe 
owes it that she is not now a den of heathen savages. He must 
be ready to assume every thing about them to be true which is 
neither absurd, immoral, nor unsupported by the same amount of 
evidence which he would require for any other historic fact. And, 



206 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

just because this very tone of mind — enthusiastic but not idola- 
trous, discriminating but not captious — runs through Mrs. Jame- 
son's work, we hail it with especial pleasure, as a fresh move in 
a truly philosophic and Christian direction. Indeed, for that 
branch of the subject which she has taken in hand, not the his- 
tory, but the poetry of legends and of the art which they awakened, 
she derives a peculiar fitness, not merely from her own literary 
talents and acquaintance with continental art, but also from the 
very fact of her being an English wife and mother. Women 
ought, perhaps, always to make the best critics — at once more 
quicksighted, more tasteful, more sympathetic than ourselves, 
whose proper business is creation. Perhaps in Utopia they will 
take the reviewer's business entirely off our hands, as they are 
said to be doing already, by the by, in one leading periodical. 
But of all critics an English matron ought to be the best — open 
as she should be, by her womanhood, to all tender and admiring 
sympathies, accustomed by her Protestant education to unsullied 
purity of thought, and inheriting from her race, not only freedom 
of mind and reverence for antiquity, but the far higher birthright 
of English honesty. 

And such a genial and honest spirit, we think, runs through 
this book. 

Another difficult task, perhaps the most difficult of all, the 
authoress has well performed. We mean the handling of stories 
whose facts she partly or wholly disbelieves, while she admires 
and loves their spirit and moral ; or doctrines, to pronounce on 
whose truth or falsehood is beyond her subject. This difficulty 
Mr. Newman, in the Lives of the English Saints, edited and 
partly written by him, turned with wonderful astuteness to the 
advantage of Romanism ; but others, more honest, have not been 
so victorious. Witness the painfully uncertain impression left 
by some parts of Mr. Milman's History of Christianity, and, if 
the Quarterly Review will excuse us, by the latter, in one or two 
of those masterly articles on Romish heroes which appeared in 
that periodical ; an uncertainty which we have the fullest reason 
to believe was most foreign to the reviewer's mind and conscience. 
Even Mr. Macaulay's brilliant history here and there falls into 
the same snare. No one but those who have tried it can be 
aware of the extreme difficulty of preventing the dramatic his- 
torian from degenerating into an apologist or heating into a 
sneerer ; or understand the ease with which an earnest author, 
in a case like the present, becomes frantically reckless, under the 
certainty that, say what he will, he will be called a Jesuit by the 
Protestants, an Infidel by the Papists, a Pantheist by the Ultra 
High- Church, and a Rogue by all three. 



THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 207 

Now, as we intend to say nothing of the authoress but what 
she will like, we certainly shall not say that she is greater than 
Milman or Macaulay ; but we must say, that female tact and 
deep devotional feeling cut the Gordian knot which has puzzled 
more cunning heads. Not that Mrs. Jameson is faultless ; we 
want something yet, in the telling of a Christian fairy-tale, and 
know not what we want ; but never were legends narrated with 
more discernment and simplicity than these. 

As an instance, take the legend of St. Dorothea, (vol. ii. p. 184,) 
which is especially one of those stories of " sainted personages 
who," as Mrs. Jameson says, "lived, or are supposed to have 
lived, in the first ages of Christianity ; and whose real history, 
founded on fact or tradition, has been so disguised by poetical em- 
broidery, that they have in some sort the air of ideal beings ; " 
and which may, therefore, be taken as a complete test of the 
authoress's tact and honesty : — 

"In the province of Cappadocia and in the city of Csesarea, dwelt a 
noble virgin, whose name was Dorothea. In the whole city there was 
none to be compared to her in beauty and grace of person. She was 
a Christian, and served God day and night with prayers, with fasting, 
and with alms. 

" The governor of the city, by name Sapritius (or Fabricius,) was a 
very terrible persecutor of the Christians, and hearing of the maiden, 
and of her great beauty, he ordered her to be brought before him. She 
came, with her mantle folded on her bosom, and her eyes meekly cast 
down. The governor asked, 4 Who art thou?' and she replied, 'I 
am Dorothea, a virgin, and a servant of Jesus Christ.' He said, 
4 Thou must serve our gods, or die/ She answered mildly, ' Be it 
so ; the sooner shall I stand in the presence of Him whom I most de- 
sire to behold/ Then the governor asked her, ' Whom meanest 
thou ? ' She replied, ' I mean the Son of God, Christ, mine espoused ! 
his dwelling is paradise ; by his side are joys eternal ; and in his gar- 
den grow celestial fruits and roses that never fade/ Then Sapritius, 
overcome by her eloquence and beauty, ordered her to be carried 
back to her dungeon. And he sent to her two sisters, whose names 
were Calista and Christeta, who had once been Christians, but who, 
from terror of the torments with which they were threatened, had 
renounced their faith in Christ. To these women the governor pro- 
mised large rewards if they would induce Dorothea to follow their 
evil example ; and they, nothing doubting of success, boldly undertook 
the task. The result, however, was far different ; for Dorothea, full 
of courage and constancy, reproved them as one having authority, 
and drew such a picture of the joys they had forfeited through their 
falsehood and cowardice, that they fell at her feet, saying, ' O blessed 
Dorothea, pray for us, that, through thy intercession, our sin may be 
forgiven and our penitence accepted ! ' And she did so. And when 
they had left the dungeon they proclaimed aloud that they were ser- 
vants of Christ. 



208 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES, 

w Then the governor, furious, commanded that they should be burned, 
and that Dorothea should witness their torments. And she stood by, 
bravely encouraging them, and saying, ' O my sisters, fear not ! suffer 
to the end ! for these transient pangs shall be followed by the joys of 
eternal life ! ' Thus they died : and Dorothea herself was condemned 
to be tortured cruelly, and then beheaded. The first part of her sen- 
tence she endured with invincible fortitude. She was then led forth 
to death ; and, as she went, a young man, a lawyer of the city, named 
Theophilus, who had been present when she was first brought before 
the governor, called to her mockingly, ' Ha ! fair maiden, goest thou 
to join thy bridegroom ? Send me, I pray thee, of the fruits and 
flowers of that same garden of which thou hast spoken : I would fain 
taste of them ! ' And Dorothea, looking on him, inclined her head 
with a gentle smile, and said, ' Thy request, O Theophilus, is granted.' 
Whereat he laughed aloud with his companions ; but she went on 
cheerfully to death. 

" When she came to the place of execution, she knelt down and 
prayed ; and suddenly appeared at her side a beautiful boy, with hair 
bright as sunbeams — 

' A smooth-faced, glorious thing. 

With thousand blessings dancing in his eyes.* 

In his hand he held a basket containing three apples, and three fresh- 
gathered and fragrant roses. She said to him, ' Carry these to Theo- 
philus, say that Dorothea hath sent them, and that I go before him to 
the garden whence they came, and await him there/ With these 
words she bent her neck, and received the death-stroke. 

" Meantime the angel (for it was an angel) went to seek Theophilus, 
and found him still laughing in merry mood over the idea of the prom- 
ised gift. The angel placed before him the basket of celestial fruit 
and flowers, saying, ' Dorothea sends thee this,' and vanished. What 
words can express the wonder of Theophilus ? Struck by the prodigy 
operated in his favour, his heart melted within him ; he tasted of the 
celestial fruit, and a new life was his ; he proclaimed himself a servant 
of Christ, and, following the example of Dorothea, suffered with like 
constancy in the cause of truth, and obtained the crown of martyrdom." 

We have chosen this legend just because it is in itself as super- 
stitious and fantastic as any in the book. We happen to hold 
the dream of " The Spiritual Marriage," as there set forth, in 
especial abhorrence, and we have no doubt Mrs. Jameson does 
so also. We are well aware of the pernicious effect which this 
doctrine has exercised on matrimonial purity among the southern 
nations ; that by making chastity synonymous with celibacy, it 
degraded married faithfulness into a restriction which there were 
penalties for breaking, but no rewards for keeping. We see 
clearly enough the cowardice, the short-sightedness, of fancying 
that man can ensure the safety of his soul by fleeing from the 
world ; — in plain English, deserting the post to which God has 
called him, like the monks and nuns of old. We believe that 



THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 209 

the numbers of the early martyrs have been exaggerated. We 
believe they were like ourselves, imperfect and inconsistent human 
beings ; that, on the showing of the legends and fathers them- 
selves, their testimony for the truth was too often impaired by 
superstition, fanaticism, or passion. But granting all this, we 
must still say, in the words of one who cannot be suspected of 
Eomanizing, the great Dr. Arnold: — 

" Divide the sum total of reported martyrs by twenty ; by fifty, if 
you will ; after all, you have a number of persons of all ages and 
sexes suffering cruel torments and deaths for conscience sake, and for 
Christ's ; and by their sufferings, manifestly with God's blessing, en- 
suring the triumph of Christ's Gospel. Neither do I think that we^ 
consider the excellence of this martyr spirit half enough." 

Indeed we do not. Let all the abatements mentioned above, 
and more, be granted ; yet even then, when we remember that 
the world from which Jerome or Anthony fled was worse than 
that denounced by Juvenal and Persius, — that the nuptials which, 
as legends say, were often offered the virgin martyrs as alter- 
natives for death, were such as employed the foul pens of Petro- 
nius and Martial, — that the tyrants whom they spurned were such 
as live in the pages of Suetonius,- — that the gods whom they 
were commanded to worship, the rites in which they were to 
join, wAere those over which Ovid and Apuleius had gloated, 
which Lucian had held up to the contempt of heathendom itself — 
that the tortures which they preferred to apostasy and to foul 
crimes were, by the confessions of the heathens themselves, too 
horrible for pen to tell, — it does raise a flush of indignation to 
hear some sleek bigot-skeptic, bred up in the safety and luxury 
of modern England among Habeas Corpus Acts and endowed 
churches, trying from his warm fire-side to sneer away the awful 
responsibilities and the heroic fortitude of valiant men and tender 
girls, to whose piety and courage he owes the very enlighten- 
ment, the very civilization, of which he boasts. 

It is an error, doubtless, and a fearful one, to worship even 
such as them. But the error, when it arose, was at worst the 
caricature of a blessed truth. Even for the sinful, surely it was 
better to admire holiness than to worship their own sin. Shame 
on those who, calling themselves Christians, repine that a Cecilia 
or a Magdalen replaced an Isis and a Venus, who can fancy that 
they are serving Protestantism by tracing malevolent likenesses 
between even the idolatry of a saint and the idolatry of a devil ! 
True, there was idolatry in both, as gross in one as the other. 
And what wonder ? What wonder if, amid a world of courte- 
zans, the nun was worshipped ? At least God allowed it ; and 
will men be wiser than God ? " The times of that ignorance He 
winked at." The lie that was in it He did not interfere to punish. 



210 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

He did more ; he let it work out, as all lies will, their own pun- 
ishment. We may see that in the miserable century which pre- 
ceded the glorious Reformation ; we may see it in the present 
state of Spain and Italy. The crust of lies, we say, punished 
itself; to the germ of truth within it we partly owe that we are 
Christian men this day. 

But granting, or rather boldly asserting all this, and smiling 
as much as we choose at the tale of St. Dorothea's celestial bas- 
ket, is it not absolutely, and in spite of all, an exquisite story ? 
Is it likely to make people better or worse ? We might believe 
the whole of it, and yet we need not, therefore, turn idolaters and 
• worship sweet Dorothea for a goddess. But if, as we trust in 
God is the case, we are too wise to believe it all — if even we see 
no reason (and there is not much) for believing one single word 
of it — yet still we ask, is it not an exquisite story ? Is there not 
heroism in it greater than of all the Ajaxes and Achilles who 
ever blustered on this earth ? Is there not power greater than 
of kings — God's strength made perfect in woman's weakness ? 
Tender forgiveness, the Saviour's own likeness ; glimpses, bril- 
liant and true at the core, however distorted and miscolored, of . 
that spiritual world where the wicked cease from troubling, 
where the meek alone shall inherit the earth, where, as Protes- 
tants too believe, all that is spotless and beautiful in nature as 
well as in man shall bloom for ever perfect ? 

It is especially in her descriptions of paintings that Mrs. 
Jameson's great talents are displayed. Nowhere do we recollect 
criticisms more genial, brilliant, picturesque, than those which are 
scattered through these pages. Often they have deeper merits, 
and descend to those fundamental laws of beauty and of religion 
by which all Christian art must ultimately be tested. Mrs. 
Jameson has certainly a powerful inductive faculty ; she com- 
prehends at once the idea * and central law of a work of art, and 
sketches it in a few vivid and masterly touches ; and really, to 
use a hack quotation honestly for once, " in thoughts which 

* We are sorry to see, however, that Mrs. Jameson has been so far untrue 
to her own faculty as to join in the common mistake of naming Raphael's well- 
known cartoon at Hampton Court, " Elymas the Sorcerer struck Blind." On 
the supposition that this is its subject, its method of arrangement is quite un- 
worthy of the rest, as the action would be split into the opposite corners of the 
picture, and the post of honour in the centre occupied by a figure of secondary 
importance; besides, the picture would lose its significance as one of this great 
series on " Religious Conviction and Conversion." But, strange to say, Raphael 
has all the while especially guarded against this very error, by labelling the 
picture with a description of its subject. Directly under the central figure is 
written, " Sergius Paulus, Proconsul, embraces the Christian faith at the 
preaching of Paul." Taking which simple hint, and looking at the face of 
the proconsul, (himself a miracle of psychology,) as the centre to which all is 
to be referred, the whole composition, down to the minutest details, arranges 
itself at once in that marvellous unity, which is Raphael's especial glory. 



THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 211 

breathe, and words which burn." As an instance, we must be 
allowed to quote at length this charming passage on angel paint- 
ings, so valuable does it seem not only as information, but as a 
specimen of what criticism should be : — 

" On the revival of art, we find the Byzantine idea of angels every- 
where prevailing. The angels in Cimabue's famous i Virgin and 
Child enthroned/ are grand creatures, rather stern ; but this arose, I 
think, from his inability to express beauty. The colossal angels at 
Assissi, solemn sceptred kingly forms, all alike in action and attitude, 
appeared to me magnificent. 

" In the angels of Giotto we see the commencement of a softer grace 
and a purer taste, farther developed by some of his scholars. Benozzo 
Gozzoli and Orcagna have left in the Campo Santo examples of the 
most graceful and fanciful treatment. Of Benozzo's angels in the 
Riccardi palace I have spoken at length. His master, Angelico, 
(worthy the name !) never reached the same power of expressing the 
rapturous rejoicing of celestial beings, but his conception of the angelic 
nature remains unapproached, unapproachable ; it is only his, for it was 
the gentle, passionless, refined nature of the recluse which stamped 
itself there. Angelico's angels are unearthly, not so much in form 
as in sentiment ; and superhuman, not in power but in purity. In 
other hands, any imitation of his soft ethereal grace would become 
feeble and insipid. With their long robes falling round their feet, and 
drooping many-coloured wings, they seem not to fly or to walk, but to 
float along ' smooth sliding without step/ Blessed, blessed creatures ! 
love us, only love us ; for we dare not task your soft, serene beatitude, 
by asking you to help us ! 

'* There is more sympathy with humanity in Francia's angels : they 
look as if they could weep, as well as love and sing. 

* ' ' ■* # * * * * 

" Correggio's angels are grand and lovely, but they are like children 
enlarged and sublimated, not like spirits taking the form of children ; 
where they smile it is truly, as Annibal Caracci expresses it, — con una 
naturalezza et simplicitd che innamora e sforza a riclere con loro ; but 
the smile in many of Correggio's angel heads has something sublime 
and spiritual, as well as simple and natural. 

" And Titian's angels impress me in a similar manner — I mean those 
in the Glorious Assumption at Venice — with their childish forms and 
features, but an expression caught from beholding the face of 'our 
Father that is in heaven : ' it is glorified infancy. I remember stand- 
ing before this picture, contemplating those lovely spirits one after 
another, until a thrill came over me like that which I felt when Men- 
delssohn played the organ, — I became music while I listened. The 
face of one of those angels is to the face of a child just what that of 
the Virgin in the same picture is compared with the fairest of the 
daughters of earth : it is not here superiority of beauty, but mind, and 
music, and love kneaded, as it were, into form and colour. 

" But Raphael, excelling in all things, is here excellent above all : 
his angels combine, in a higher degree than any other, the various 
faculties and attributes in which the fancy loves to clothe these pure, 



212 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

immortal, beatified creatures. The angels of Giotto, of Benozzo, of 
Fiesole, are, if not female, feminine ; those of Filippo Lippi, and of 
Andrea, masculine : but you cannot say of those of Raphael that they 
are masculine or feminine. The idea of sex is wholly lost in the blend- 
ing of power, intelligence, and grace. In his earlier pictures, grace is 
the predominant characteristic, as in the dancing and singing angels 
in his Coronation of the Virgin. In his later pictures the sentiment 
in his ministering angels is more spiritual, « more dignified. As a per- 
fect example of grand and poetical feeling, I may cite the angels as 
4 Regents of the Planets,' in the Capella Chigiana. The cupola repre- 
sents in a circle the creation of the solar system, according to the 
theological and astronomical (or rather astrological) notions which 
then prevailed — a hundred years before ' the starry Galileo and his 
woes. 7 In the centre is the Creator ; around, in eight compartments, 
we have, first the angel of the celestial sphere, who seems to be listen- 
ing to the divine mandate, — ' Let there be lights in the firmament of 
heaven ; ' then follow, in their order, the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, 
Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The name of each planet is ex- 
pressed by its mythological representative; the Sun by Apollo, the 
Moon by Diana : and over each presides a grand colossal winged spirit, 
seated or reclining on a portion of the zodiac as on a throne. I have 
selected two angels to give an idea of this peculiar and poetical treat- 
ment. The union of the theological and the mythological attributes is 
in the classical taste of the time, and quite Miltonic. In Raphael's child- 
angels, the expression of power and intelligence, as well as innocence, 
is quite wonderful ; for instance, look at the two angel-boys in the Dres- 
den Madonna di San Sisto, and the angels, or celestial genii, who bear 
along the Almighty when he appears to Noah. No one has expressed 
like Raphael the action of flight, except perhaps Rembrandt. The 
angel who descends to crown Santa Felicita cleaves the air with the 
action of a swallow ; and the angel in Rembrandt's Tobit soars like a 
lark with upward motion, spurning the earth. 

" Michael Angelo rarely gave wings to his angels ; I scarcely recollect 
an instance, except the angel in the Annunciation : and his exagger- 
ated human forms, his colossal creatures, in which the idea of power is 
conveyed through attitude and muscular action, are, to my taste, worse 
than unpleasing. My admiration for this wonderful man is so pro- 
found that I can afford to say this. His angels are superhuman, but 
hardly angelic : and while in Raphael's angels we do not feel the 
want of wings, we feel while looking at those of Michael Angelo that 
not even the ' sail-broad vans ' with which Satan laboured through the 
surging abyss of chaos could suffice to lift those Titantic forms from 
earth, and sustain them in mid-air. The group of angels over the 
Last Judgment, flinging their mighty limbs about, and those that sur- 
round the descending figure of Christ in the conversion of St. Paul, 
may be referred to here as characteristic examples. The angels, 
blowing their trumpets, puff and strain like so many troopers. Surely 
this is not angelic : there may be power, great, imaginative, and artis- 
tic power, exhibited in the conception of form, but in the beings them- 
selves there is more of effort than of power : serenity, tranquillity, 
beatitude, ethereal purity, spiritual grace, are out of the question." 



THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 213 

In this passage we may remark an excellence in Mrs. Jame- 
son's mode of thought which has become lately somewhat rare. 
We mean a freedom from that bigoted and fantastic habit of 
mind which leads nowadays the worshippers of high art to exalt 
the early schools to the disadvantage of all others, and to talk as 
if Christian painting had expired with Perugino. We were 
much struck with our authoress's power of finding spiritual truth 
and beauty in Titian's "Assumption," one of the very pictures in 
which the " high art" party are wont to see nothing but " coarse- 
ness " and " earthliness " of conception. She, having, we suppose, 
a more acute as well as a more healthy eye for the beautiful and 
the spiritual, and, therefore, able to perceive its slightest traces 
wherever they exist, sees in those " earthly " faces of the great 
masters, " an expression caught from beholding the face of our 
Father that is in heaven." The face of one of those " angels," 
she continues, "is to the face of a child just what that of the 
Virgin in the same picture is compared with the fairest of the 
daughters of earth : it is not here superiority of beauty, but mind, 
and music, and love kneaded, as it were, into form and colour." 

Mrs. Jameson acknowledges her great obligations to M. Rio ; 
and all students of art must be thankful to him for the taste, 
learning, and earnest religious feeling which he had expended 
on the history of the earlier schools of painting. An honest man, 
doubtless, he is ; but it does not follow, alas ! in this piecemeal 
world, that he should write an honest book. And his bigotry 
stands in painful contrast to the genial and comprehensive spirit 
by which Mrs. Jameson seems able to appreciate the specific 
beauties of all schools and masters. M. Rio's theory (and he is 
the spokesman of a large party) is, unless we much misjudge 
him, this, — that the ante-Raffaellic is the only Christian art ; 
and that all the excellences of these early painters came from 
their Romanism ; all their faults from his two great bugbears, — 
Byzantinism and Paganism. In his eyes, the Byzantine idea of 
art was Manichean ; in which we fully coincide, but add, that 
the idea of the early Italian painters was almost equally so ; and 
that almost all in them that was not Manichean they owe not to 
their Romanism or their Asceticism, but to their healthy lay- 
man's common sense, and to the influence of that very classical 
art which they are said to have been pious enough to despise. 
Bigoted and ascetic Romanists have been, in all ages, in a hurry 
to call people Manicheans, all the more fiercely because their 
own consciences must have hinted to them that they were some- 
what Manichean themselves. When a man suspects his own 
honesty, he is, of course, inclined to prove himself blameless by 
shouting the loudest against the dishonesty of others. Now M. 



214 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Rio sees clearly and philosophically enough what is the root of 
Manicheanism, — the denial that that which is natural, beautiful, 
human, belongs to God. He imputes it justly to those Byzantine 
artists who fancied it carnal to attribute beauty to the Saviour or 
to the Virgin Mary, and tried to prove their own spirituality by 
representing their sacred personages in the extreme of ugliness 
and emaciation, though some of the specimens of their painting 
which Mrs. Jameson gives proves that this abhorrence of beauty 
was not so universal as M. Rio would have us believe. We agree 
with him that this absurdity was learned from them by earlier 
and semi-barbarous Italian artists, that these latter rapidly es- 
caped from it, and began rightly to embody their conceptions in 
beautiful forms ; and yet we must urge against them, too, the 
charge of Manicheanism, and of a spiritual eclecticism also, far 
deeper and more pernicious than the mere outward eclecticism 
of manner which has drawn down hard names on the school of 
the Caracci. 

For an eclectic, if it mean any thing, means this, — one who, 
in any branch of art or science, refuses to acknowledge Bacon's 
great law, " That Nature is only conquered by obeying her ; " 
who will not take a full and reverent view of the whole mass of 
facts with which he has to deal, and from them deducing the 
fundamental laws of his subject, obey them whithersoever they 
may lead ; but who picks and chooses out of them just so many 
as may be pleasant to his private taste, and then constructs a 
partial system which differs from the essential ideas of Nature, 
in proportion to the number of facts which he has determined to 
discard. And such a course was pursued in art by the ascetic 
painters between the time of Giotte and Raffaelle. Their idea 
of beauty was a partial and a Manichean one ; in their adoration 
for a fictitious " angelic nature," made up from all which is nega- 
tive in humanity, they were prone to despise all by which man 
is brought in contact with this earth, — the beauties of sex, of 
strength, of activity, of grandeur of form ; all that is, in which 
Greek art excels : their ideal of beauty was altogether effeminate. 
They prudishly despised the anatomic study of the human figure, 
of landscape and chiaroscuro. Spiritual expression with them 
was everything ; but it was only the expression of the passive 
spiritual faculties, of innocence, devotion, meekness, resignation ; 
all good, but not the whole of humanity. Not that they could 
be quite consistent in their theory. They were forced to paint 
their very angels as human beings ; and a standard of human 
beauty they had to find somewhere ; and they found one, strange 
to say, exactly like that of the old Pagan statues, and only dif- 
fering in that ascetic and emasculate tone, which was peculiar 



THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 215 

to themselves. Here is a dilemma which the worshippers of 
high art have slurred over. Where did Angelico da Fiesole get 
the idea of beauty which dictated his exquisite angels ? We 
shall not, I suppose, agree with those who attribute it to direct 
inspiration, and speak of it as the reward of the prayer and 
fasting by which the good monk used to prepare himself for 
painting. Must we then confess that he borrowed his beauties 
from the faces of the prettiest nuns with whom he was acquainted? 
That would be sad naturalism ; and sad eclecticism, too, consid- 
ering that he must have seen among his Italian sisters, a great 
many beauties of a very different type from that which he has 
chosen to copy ; though, we suppose, of God's making equally 
with that of his favourite. Or did he, in spite of himself, steal 
a side-glance now and then at some of the unrivalled antique 
statues of his country, and copy on the sly any feature or pro- 
portion in them which was emasculate enough to be worked into 
his pictures ? That, too, is likely enough ; nay, it is certain. 
We are perfectly astonished how any draughtsman, at least how 
such a critic as M. Rio, can look at the early Italian painters 
without tracing everywhere in them the classic touch, the pecu- 
liar tendency to mathematic curves in the outlines, which is the 
distinctive peculiarity of Greek art. Is not Giotto, the father of 
Italian art, full of it in every line ? Is not Perugino ? Is not 
the angel of Lorenzo Credi in Mrs. Jameson's woodcut ? Is not 
Francia, except just where he is stiff, and soft, and clumsy ? Is 
not Fra Angelico himself ? Is it not just the absence of this 
Greek tendency to mathematical forms in the German painters 
before Albert Durer, which makes the specific difference, evi- 
dent to every boy, between the drawing of the Teutonic and 
Italian schools ? 

But, if so, what becomes of the theory which calls Pagan art 
by all manner of hard names ? which dates the downfall of Chris- - 
tian art from the moment when painters first lent an eye to its 
pernicious seductions ? How can those escape the charge of 
eclecticism, who, without going to the root-idea of Greek art, 
filched from its outside just as much as suited their purpose ? 
And how, lastly, can M. Rio's school of critics escape the charge 
of Manichean contempt for God's world and man, not as ascetics 
have fancied him, but as God has made him, when they think 
it a sufficient condemnation of a picture to call it naturalistic ; 
when they talk and act about art as if the domain of the beauti- 
ful were the devil's kingdom, from which some few species of 
form and elements were to be stolen by Christian painters, and 
twisted from their original evil destination into the service of 
religion ? 



216 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

On the other hand, we owe much to those early ascetic pain- 
ters ; their works are a possession for ever. No future school 
of religious art will be able to rise to eminence without taking 
full cognizance of them, and learning from them their secret. 
They taught artists, and priests, and laymen, too, that beauty is 
only worthy of admiration when it is the outward sacrament of 
the beauty of the soul within ; they helped to deliver men from 
that idolatry to merely animal strength and loveliness into which 
they were in danger of falling in ferocious ages, and among the 
relics of Roman luxury ; they asserted the superiority of the 
spirit over the flesh ; according to their light, they were faithful 
preachers of the great Christian truth, that devoted faith, and not 
fierce self-will, is man's glory. "Well did their pictures tell to 
brutal peasant, and to still more brutal warrior, that God's might 
was best shown forth, not in the elephantine pride of a Hercules, 
or the Titantic struggles of a Laocoon, but in the weakness of 
martyred women, and of warriors who were content meekly to 
endure shame and death, for the sake of Him who conquered by 
sufferings, and bore all human weaknesses ; who u was led as a 
lamb to the slaughter, and, like a sheep dumb before the shearers, 
opened not his mouth." 

We must conclude with a few words on one point on which 
we differ somewhat from Mrs. Jameson— the allegoric origin of 
certain legendary stories. She calls the story of the fiend, under 
the form of a dragon, devouring St. Margaret, and then bursting 
at the sign of the cross while the saint escaped unhurt, " another 
form of the familiar allegory — the power of Sin overcome by the 
power of the Cross." 

And again, vol. ii. p. 4 : — 

" The legend of St. George came to us from the East ; where, under 
various forms, as Apollo and the Python, as Bellerophon and the 
Chimsera, as Perseus and the Sea-monster, we see perpetually recur- 
ring the mythic allegory by which was figured the conquest achieved 
by beneficent Power over the tyranny of wickedness, and which reap- 
pears in Christian art in the legends of St. Michael and half a hundred 
other saints." 

To us these stories seem to have had by no means an allegoric, 
but rather a strictly historic foundation ; and our reasons for this 
opinion may possibly interest some readers. 

Allegory, strictly so called, is the offspring of an advanced, 
and not of a semi-barbarous state of society. Its home is in the 
East — not the East of barbarous Pontine countries peopled by 
men of our own race, where the legend of St. George is allowed 
to have sprung up, but of the civilized, metaphysical, dark -haired 



THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 217 

races of Egypt, Syria, and Hindostan. The " objectivity " of 
the Gothic mind has never had any sympathy with it. The 
Teutonic races, like the earlier Greeks, before they were tinc- 
tured with Eastern thought, had always wanted historic facts, 
dates, names, and places. They even found it necessary to im- 
port their saints ; to locate Mary Magdalene at Marseilles, 
Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury, the three Magi at Cologne, 
before they could thoroughly love or understand them. Eng- 
lishmen especially cannot write allegories. John Bunyan alone 
succeeded tolerably, but only because his characters and language 
were such as he had encountered daily at every fireside and in 
every meeting-house. But Spenser wandered perpetually away, 
or rather, rose up from his plan into mere dramatic narrative. 
His work and other English allegories, are hardly allegoric at 
all, but rather symbolic ; spiritual laws in them are not expressed 
by arbitrary ciphers, but embodied in imaginary examples, suffi- 
ciently startling or simple to form a plain key to other and deeper 
instances of the same law. They are analogous to those symbolic 
devotional pictures, in which the Madonna and saints of all ages 
are grouped together with the painter's own contemporaries — no 
allegories at all, but a plain embodiment of a fact in which the 
artist believed ; not only ft the communion of all saints," but also 
their habit of assisting, often in visible form, the Christians of his 
own time. 

These distinctions may seem over-subtle, but our meaning will 
surely be plain to any one who will compare The Faery Queen, 
or The Legend of St, George, with the Gnostic or Hindoo rev- 
eries, and the fantastic and truly Eastern interpretation of Scrip- 
ture, which the European monks borrowed from Egypt. Our 
opinion is, that in the old legends the moral did not create the 
story, but the story the moral ; and that the story had generally 
a nucleus of fact within all its distortions and exaggerations. 
This holds good of the Odinic and Grecian myths ; all are now 
more or less inclined to believe that the deities of Zeus' s or Odin's 
dynasties were real conquerors or civilizers of flesh and blood, 
like the Manco Capac of the Peruvians, and that it was around 
records of their real victories over barbarous aborigines, and over 
the brute powers of nature, that extravagant myths grew up, till 
more civilized generations began to say, — " These tales must 
have some meaning — they must be either allegories or non- 
sense ; " and then fancied, that in the remaining thread of fact 
they found a clue to the mystic sense of the whole. 

Such, we suspect, has been the history of St. George and the 
Dragon, as well as of Apollo and the Python. It is very hard 
to have to give up the dear old dragon who haunted our nursery 

10 



218 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

dreams, especially when there is no reason for it. We have no 
patience with antiquaries who tell us that the dragons who 
guarded princesses were merely " the winding walls or moats of 
their castles." What use, then, pray, was there in the famous 
nether garment with which Regnar Lodbrog (shaggy-trousers) 
choked the dragon who guarded his lady love ? And Regnar 
was a real piece of flesh and blood, as King JElla and our Saxon 
forefathers found to their cost : his awful death-dirge, and the 
effect which it produced, are well known to historians. We can- 
not give up Regnar's trousers, for we suspect the key to the 
whole dragon-question is in the pocket of them. 

Seriously, Why should not these dragons have been simply 
what the Greek word dragon means — what the earliest romances, 
the Norse myths, and the superstitions of the peasantry in many 
parts of England to this day, assert them to have been — " mighty 
worms/' huge snakes ? All will agree that the Python, the rep- 
resentative in the old world of the " Boa Constrictor " of the 
new, was common in the Homeric age, if not later, both in 
Greece and in Italy. It existed on the opposite coast of Africa 
(where it is now extinct) in the time of Regulus ; we believe, 
from the traditions of all nations, that it existed to a far later 
date in more remote and barbarous parts of Europe. There is 
every reason to suppose that it still lingered in England after the 
invasion of the Cymri — say not earlier than b. c. 600 — for it was 
among them an object of worship ; and we question whether 
they would have been likely to have adored a foreign animal, 
and, as at Abury, built enormous temples in imitation of its 
windings, and called them by its name. 

The only answer to these traditions has as yet been, that no 
reptile of that bulk is known in cold climates. Yet the Python 
still lingers in the Hungarian marshes. Only two years ago a 
huge snake, as large as the Pythons of Hindostan, spread havoc 
among the flocks and terror among the peasantry. Had it been 
Ariosto's " Ore," an a priori argument from science would have 
had weight. A marsupiate sea-monster is horribly unorthodox ; 
and the dragon, too, has doubtless been made a monster of, but 
most unjustly ; his legs have been patched on by crocodile-slay- 
ing crusaders, while his wings — where did they come from ? 
From the traditions of " flying serpents," which have so strangely 
haunted the deserts of Upper Egypt from the time of the old 
Hebrew prophets, and which may not, after all, be such lies as 
folk fancy. Oh how scientific prigs shook with laughter at the 
notion of a flying dragon ! till one day geology revealed to them, 
in the Pterodactylus, that a real flying dragon, on the model of 
Carlo Crivelli's in Mrs. Jameson's book, with wings before and 



THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART. 219 

legs behind, only more monstrous than that, and than all the 
dreams of Seba and Aldrovandus, (though some of theirs, to be 
sure, have seven heads,) got its living once on a time in this very 
island of England ! But such is the way of this wise world ! 
When Le Vaillant, in the last century, assured the Parisians 
that he had shot a giraffe at the Cape, he was politely informed 
that the giraffe was fabulous, extinct, — in short, that he lied ; and 
now, behold ! this very year the respectable old unicorn (and 
good Tories ought to rejoice to hear it) has been discovered at 
last by a German naturalist, Von Muller, in Abyssinia, just 
where our fathers told us to look for it ! And why should we not 
find the flying serpent, too ? The interior of Africa is as yet an 
unknown world of wonders. If half the money had been spent 
on exploration there which has gone on increasing the horrors of 
the slave-trade, at the price of good English blood, we might 
have discovered — for aught we know, the descendants of the 
very satyr who chatted with St. Anthony ! 

No doubt the discovery of huge fossil animals, as Mrs. 
Jameson says, on the high authority of Professor Owen, may 
have modified our ancestors' notions of dragons ; but in the old 
serpent worship we believe the real explanation of these stories 
is to be found. There is no doubt that human victims, and even 
young maidens, were offered to these snake gods ; even the 
sunny mythology of Greece retains horrible traces of such cus- 
toms, which lingered in Arcadia, the mountain-fastness of the 
older and conquered race. Similar, cruelties existed among the 
Mexicans ; and there are but too many traces of it throughout 
the history of heathendom. 

And the same superstition may, as the legends assert, have 
lingered on, or been, at least, revived during the later ages of the 
empire, in remote provinces, left in their primeval barbarism, at 
the same time that they were brutalized by the fiendish exhibi- 
tions of the Circus and persecutions of the Christians, which the 
Roman governors found it their interest to introduce everywhere. 
Thus the serpent became naturally regarded as the manifestation 
of the evil spirit by Christians as well as by the old Hebrews ; 
thus, also, it became the presiding genius of the malaria and fever, 
which arose from the fens haunted by it — a superstition which 
gave rise to the theory that the tales of Hercules, and the Hydra, 
Apollo and the mud-Python, St. George and the Dragon, were 
sanitary-reform allegories, and the monsters whose poisonous 
breath destroy cattle and young maidens only typhus and con- 
sumption. We see no reason why early Christian heroes should 
not have actually met with such snake gods, and felt themselves 
bound, like Southey's Madoc, or Daniel in the old rabbinical story, 



220 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

whose truth has never been disproved, to destroy the monsters at 
all risk. And we doubt not that their righteous daring would 
have been crowned with victory ; and that on such events were 
gradually built up the dragon-slaying legends, which charmed all 
Europe, and grew in extravagances and absurdities, till they 
began to degenerate into the bombast of the Seven Champions, 
and expired in the immortal ballad of the Dragon of Wantley, in 
which More of More Hall, on the morning of his battle with the 
monster, invoked the saints no more, but 

To make him strong and mighty- 
He drank by the tale 
Six pots of ale, 

And a quart of aqua-vitae. 

So ended the sublime sport of dragon-slaying. Its only rem- 
nant may now be seen in Hindostan, where some sacred alligator, 
for years the tenant of a tank or moat, and piously allowed to 
devour at his will the washerwomen and girls who fetch water, 
expiates his murders, not on the point of saintly lance, but in 
our stupid practical English way, by the rifle-bullet of some sub- 
altern lounging in the barrack window, who is suddenly awakened 
from tobacco and vacuity by the reflection, — " It's a cursed 
shame that that big fellow should eat up all the pretty girls ! " 



NORTH DEVON. 221 



NORTH DEVON. 

[Fraser's Magazine.] 
CHAPTER I. 

NORTH DEVON AS IT IS NOT. 

It has long seemed to us most marvellous, that the beauties of 
this remote district have as yet called out the talents of no good 
artist or poet. Strange that fifty miles of coast, from Minehead 
to Tintagel, combining every variety of beauty, from the softest 
to the most savage — the fauna and flora of which, both by land 
and sea, are two of the richest in curious and nearly extirpated 
species which any part of England possesses ; inhabited by a 
race of people peculiarly remarkable, both in physical and intel- 
lectual development ; rich in legends, romances, and superstitions 
of every kind, still recent and living in the belief of the inhabit- 
ants, — most strange is it that such a country should still remain 
dumb, illustrated by nothing better, as far as we have seen, than a 
few paltry, incorrect lithographs, and sung in no worthier strains 
than those' of Mr. Bamfield's llfracombe Guide, a very faithful 
and well-stuffed half-crown's worth no doubt, but of the " hod- 
carrying" and not the " architectural" kind. 

It was, therefore, with hope and pleasure that we saw 
announced in the publisher's list a book called Exmoor, or the 
Footsteps of St. Hubert in the West. " Now," thought we, " the 
old county has found a voice at last." Our half-enlightened cock- 
ney public, who follow each other, summer after summer, artists 
and tourists, reading parties and idling parties, like sheep after 
the bellwether, through the accredited gaps, along the accredited 
trackways, sheltering themselves at night only under the accredited 
furze-bushes, though there may be hundreds of taller and warmer 
ones around them, will hear, for once in their lives, of this western 
garden of the Hesperides, as yet visited by hardly any townsfolk, 

Exmoor ; or, the Footsteps of St. Hubert in the West. By H. Byng Hall, Esq. 



222 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

except the good people of Bristol, who seem to keep it all a 
secret, as the Phoenicians did their tin islands, for their own pri- 
vate behoof. 

Full of faith, therefore, in the subject, and full of hope for 
the author, we opened and tried to read, and found, not a mere 
sporting-book, but, according to our humble judgment, more — a 
very stupid and vulgar sporting-book. 

Now, we do not object to sporting-books in general, least of all 
to one on Exmoor. No place in England more worthy of one. 
No place whose beauties and peculiarities are more likely to be 
thrown into strong relief by being looked at with a sportsman's 
eye. It is so with all forests and moor-lands. The spirit of 
Robin Hood and Johnny of Breadislee is theirs. They are rem- 
nants of the home of man's fierce youth, still consecrated to the 
genius of animal excitement and savage freedom ; after all, not 
the least noble qualities of human nature. Besides, there is no 
better method of giving a living picture of a whole county than 
by taking some one feature of it as a guide, and bringing all 
other observations into harmony with that original key, Even 
in merely scientific books this is very possible. Look, for instance, 
at Hugh Miller's Old Red Sandstone, The Voyaye of the* Beagle, 
and Professor Forbes's work (we had almost said epic poem) on 
Glaciers. Even an agricultural writer, if he have a real insight 
in him — if he have any thing of that secret of the piu neV uno, 
" the power of discovering the infinite in the finite ; " of seeing, 
like a poet, trivial phenomena in their true relation to the whole 
of the great universe, into which they are so cunningly fitted ; if 
he has learned to look at all things and men, down to the mean- 
est, as living lessons, written with the finger of God ; if, in short, 
he has any true dramatic power, he may impart to that apparently 
muddiest of sciences a poetic or a humorous tone, and give the lie 
to Mephistopheles when he dissuades Faust from farming as an 
occupation too mean and filthy for a man of genius. The poetry 
of agriculture remains as yet, no doubt, unwritten, and the com- 
edy of it also ; though its farce-tragedy is being now, alas ! very 
extensively enacted in practice — unconsciously to the players. 
As for the old " pastoral " school, it only flourished before agricul- 
ture really existed ; that is, before sound science, hard labour, 
and economy, were necessary, and has been for the last two hun- 
dred years simply a lie. Nevertheless, as signs of what may be 
done even now by a genial man with so stubborn a subject as 
" turnips, barley, clover, wheat," it is worth while to look at old 
Arthur Young's books, both travels and treatises, and also at cer- 
tain very spirited Chronicles of a Clay Farm, by Talpa, lately 
publishing in the Agricultural Gazette, which teem with humour 



NORTH DEVON. 223 

and wisdom, and will hereafter, we hope, be given to us in the 
form of a separate book. 

In sporting literature, (a tenth muse, exclusively indigenous 
to England,) the same observation holds good tenfold. Some of 
our most perfect topographical sketches have been the work of 
sportsmen. Old Izaac Walton, and his friend Cotton, of Dove- 
dale, whose names will last as long as their rivers, have been 
followed by a long train of worthy pupils. White's History of 
Selborne ; Sir Humphry Davy's Salmonia ; The Wild Sports of 
the West ; Mr. St. John's charming little works on Highland 
shooting ; and, above all, Christopher North's Recreations — 
delicious book ! to be read and re-read, and laughed over, and 
cried over, the tenth time even as the first — an inexhaustible 
fairy well, springing out of the granite rock of the sturdy Scotch 
heart, through the tender green turf of a genial boyish old age. 
We might mention, too, certain Letters from an Angler in Nor- 
way in the same style, which appeared, much to our pleasure and 
instruction, in this magazine last year. But it is really invidious 
to Mr. H. Byng Hall to quote any more books, merely to depre- 
ciate his work all the lower by the contrast. " Why, then," a 
reader may ask, " take notice of a book which you have already 
all but called not worth noticing ? " Because, in the first place, 
gentle reader, people must be scared from meddling with fine sub- 
jects only to spoil them ; and, in the next place, sporting-books 
form an integral and significant, and, in our eyes, a very honour- 
able and useful part, of the English literature of this day; and, 
therefore, all shallowness, vulgarity, stupidity, or bookmaking 
in that class, must be as severely attacked as in novels and poems. 
We English owe too much to our field sports to allow people to 
talk nonsense about them. 

Half the book is not about sporting at all, but consists merely 
of bills of fare of the various eatables, drinkables, and smokables, 
of which the author partook at various houses, gentle and other, 
in the course of his trip. — The accounts of the various gentle- 
men's menages being of that minute and personal kind, which 
earned for the American Mr. Rush, and our own Capt. Basil 
Hall a somewhat unenviable notoriety, and which, we should say, 
will not promote Mr. Byng Hall's chance of being asked a second 
time to visit the hospitable squires whom he has thus unceremo- 
niously put into print. 

His one or two descriptions of scenery are the baldest common- 
place, not fit for a county newspaper. His single good story, 
about a Quaker who, having been tempted out hunting, became 
a Nimrod for life, he has spoiled in the telling. Has the good 
gentleman, by the by, as he seems to consider this a singular 



224 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

instance, been in Leicestershire during the last few years ? There 
was a certain hard-riding Quaker there whom he ought hardly 
to have failed of meeting. And there are those who can recol- 
lect another Quaker keeping as good a, stud of horses, and riding 
as hard, either in forest or enclosure, as most men south of Lei- 
cestershire. Mr. Byng Hall knows so little about the country, 
that he has never said a word, as far as we can find, about the 
splendid Exmoor fishing, the best in Devonshire, on the Barle, 
the Exe, and a dozen other tributaries, though he stayed at Dul- 
verton, the finest fishing-station in the west of England ; and he 
must needs carry us off to Axminster, a very good fishing-place 
in its way, but of which he seems to know nothing beyond the 
comestibles, and which has as much to do with Exmoor as it has 
with Salisbury Plain or Cheapsicle. As for his stories and sta- 
tistics of stag and other hunting, few as they are, we used to see 
a dozen in every number of BelVs Life or the Sporting Magazine, 
in our own mad days, written with ten times the spirit and 
understanding, vigour, and picturesqueness, either venatic or 
literary. We suppose, though we have not been able to find any 
clear account of the fact, that Mr. Hall has ridden with the 
Exmoor staghounds himself once at least in his life, for he pre- 
faces his book by a frontispiece of a " stag at bay in Watersmeet 
— taken from nature : " by memory, we apprehend., as sketch- 
books are not commonly carried out hunting. But, O favoured 
mortal ! has he actually seen a real stag at bay there ? We will 
forgive the badness of the drawing, for never stag or hounds 
" took soil " * so coolly, and the utter unlikeness of the scenery to 
that magnificent gorge. But had he nothing to tell us about that 
run or any other ? Does he fancy that it is an account of a run 
to tell us that " Found at ... . cover, held away at a slapping 
pace for .... Barn, then turned down the .... water for 
a mile, and crossed the Forest, (what a saying to him who has 
eyes and ears !) made for ... . Hill, but being headed, went 
by ... . woods to D . . • ., where he was run into, after a 
gallant race of ... . hours and .... miles?" It is nearly 
as bad as a history book ! 

Surely, like the old Greek, Diana struck him blind that day, 
for intruding unworthily on her sacred privacy. He has ridden 
with the Exmoor staghounds, and these are all the thoughts that 
he has brought away ! Could not that sudden return from rail- 
roads and civilization to the wild joys of our old Norse forefathers 
awaken one new thought in him above commonplace claptrap, 

* Mr. Byng Hall does not, we have since remarked, know how to draw a 
stag's antlers with even tolerable correctness. And yet he " drew from Nature." 
How often, in the name of all bookmakers ? 



NORTH DEVON. 225 

and the names of covers, hounds, and eatables ? We never rode 
with those staghounds, and jet we could tell him something about 
that run, wherever the stag was roused — how the panting caval- 
cade rose and fell on the huge mile-long waves of that vast 
heather sea ; how one long brown hill after another sunk down, 
grayer and grayer, behind them, and one long gray hill after 
another swelled up browner and browner before them ; and how 
the sandstone rattled and flew beneath their feet, as the great 
horses, like Homer's of old, " devoured up the plain ; " and how 
they struggled clown the hill-side, through bushes and rocks, and 
broad, slipping, rattling sheets of screes, and saw beneath them 
stag and pack galloping down the shallow, glittering river bed, 
throwing up the shingle, striking out the water in long glistening 
sheets ; and how they too swept after them, down the flat valley, 
rounding crag and headland, which opened one after another in 
interminable vista, along the narrow strip of sand and rushes, 
speckled with stunted, moss-bearded, heather-bedded hawthorns, 
between the great, grim, lifeless mountain walls. Did he feel 
even no delicious creeping of the flesh that day at the sound of 
his own horse-hoofs in the heath ? The author of Yeast distin- 
guishes between the " dull thunder of the clayey turf," and the 
" flame-like crackle of the dry stubbles ; " but he forgot a sound 
more delicate than them both, when the hoofs sweep through the 
long ling with a sound as soft as the brushing of a woman's tresses, 
and then ring down on the spungy, black, reverberating soil, chip- 
ping the honey -laden fragrant heather blossoms, and tossing them 
out in a rosy shower. Or, if that were too slight a thing for the 
observation of a fine gentleman, surely he must recollect the 
dying away of the hounds' voices, as the woodland passes engulf 
them, whether it were at Brendon or at Badgerworthy, or any 
other name ; how they brushed through the narrow forest paths, 
where the ashes were already golden, and the oaks still kept their 
sombre green, and the red leaves and berries of the mountain- 
ash showed bright beneath the dark forest aisles ; and how all of 
a sudden the wild outcry before them seemed to stop and concen- 
trate, thrown back, louder and louder as they rode, off the same 
echoing crag, till at a sudden turn of the road there stood the 
stag beneath them in the stream, his back against the black rock, 
with its green cushions of dripping velvet, knee deep in the clear 
amber water, the hounds around him, some struggling and swim- 
ming in the deep pool, some rolling, and tossing, and splashing 
in a mad, half-terrified ring, as he reared into the air on his 
great haunches, with the sparkling beads running off his red 
mane, and dropping on his knees plunged his antlers down among 
them, with blows which would have each brought certain death 

10* 



226 * KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

with it if the yielding water had not broken the shock. Does he 
not remember the death ? The huge carcass dragged out of the 
stream, followed by dripping, panting dogs, the blowing of the 
mort, and the last wild halloo, when the horn note and the voices 
rang through the autumn woods, and rolled up the smooth, flat, 
mountain sides ; and Brendon answered Countisbury, and Coun- 
tisbury sent it on to Lynmouth hills, till it swept out of the gorge 
and died away upon the Severn sea. And then, does he not 
remember the pause, and the revulsion, and the feeling of sad- 
ness and littleness, almost of shame, as he looked up for the first 
time — we can pardon his not having done so before, — and saw 
where he was, and the stupendous beauty of the hill-sides, with 
the lazy autumn clouds crawling about their tops, and the great 
sheets of screes, glaciers of stone, covering acres and acres of 
the smooth hill side, eating far into the woods below, bowing 
down the oak scrubs with their weight, and the vast, circular 
sweeps of down above him, flecked with innumerable dark spots 
of gorse, each of them guarded where they open into the river 
chasm by two mighty fortresses of " giant-snouted crags," — deli- 
cate pink and gray sandstone, from which blocks and crumbling 
boulders have been toppling slowly down for ages, beneath the 
frost and the whirlwind, and now lie in long downward streams 
upon the slope, as if the mountain had been weeping tears of stone? 
And then, as the last notes of the mort had died away, did not 
there come over him an awe at the deathless silence of the woods, 
not broken, but deepened, by the solemn unvarying monotone of 
the roaring stream beneath, which flashed and glittered, half- 
hidden in the dark leafy chasm, in clear, brown pools, reflecting ( 
every leaf and twig, in boiling pits and walls of foam, ever 
changing, and yet for ever the same, fleeting on past the poor, 
dead, reeking stag, and the silent hounds lying about on the 
moss-embroidered stones, their lolling tongues showing like bright 
crimson sparkles in the deep rich Venetian air of the green 
sombre shades ; while the startled water-ousel, with his white 
breast, flitted a few yards and stopped to stare from a rock's 
point at the strange intruders ; and a single stockdove, out of the 
bosom of the wood, began calling, sadly and softly, with a dreamy 
peaceful moan ? Did he not see and hear all this, for surely it 
was there to see and hear? 

Not he. The eye only sees that which it brings within the 
power of seeing ; and all we can say of him is, that a certain 
apparition in white leathers was at one period of its appearance 
dimly conscious of equestrian motion towards a certain brown, 
two-horned phenomenon, and other spotted phenomena, at which 
he had been taught by habit to make the articulate noises " stag" 



NORTH DEVON, 227 

and " hounds," among certain gray, and green, and brown ap- 
pearances, at which the same habit and the example of his fel- 
lows had taught him to say, " Rock, and wood, and mountain," 
and perhaps the further noises of " Lovely, splendid, majestic." 

Come, we will leave Mr. Byng Hall to his names and his 
dates, and his legs of pork, and his bottles of claret, and you 
shall wander if you choose, for a day or two with an old North 
Devon man, and he will show you what the land is like. 



CHAPTER H. 

A DAT ON EXMOOR. 

Such was the substance of the monologue with which the other 
evening we put to sleep our old friend Claude Mellot, artist and 
Londoner, whom we found at the Lyndale Hotel, in a state of 
infuriation at his own incapacity to put on canvas the manifold 
beauty with which he was surrounded. We need not say that 
we fraternized with him on the spot. Claude was full of decla- 
mations about the "new scientific school of painting" which he 
expected daily to arise ; he was " ravi " with Politics for the 
People ; he " considered Punch becoming weekly, more and more, 
the most extraordinary specimen of blameless humour and high 
satiric morality which Europe had ever seen ; " possessing " every 
excellence of poor, dear, naughty old Rabelais, without one of 
his faults ; " and, above all, he was as ready as ever to push for- 
ward, cheerfully and trustfully, into the chances of this strange 
new time, with a courage very refreshing to us in these maudlin, 
cowardly days, when in too many lands, alas ! — 

" Has come that last drear mood 
Of sated lust, and dull decrepitude — 
No faith, no art, no priest, no king, no God; 
While round their crumbling fanes in peevish ring, 
Crouched on the bare-worn sod, 
Babbling about the unreturning spring, 
And whining for dead forms, that will not save, 
The toothless sects sink snarling to their grave." 

The conversation recommenced the next morning, as we rode 
out together over the hills upon a couple of ragged ponies — he 
with his sketch-book, we with our fishing-rod and creel — up into 

the heart of Exmoor, towards a certain stream. But, gentle 

reader, in these days, when every one is an angler, we are not 
the schoolboy, who, as Shakspeare says, tells his companions of the 
bird's nest that he may go and steal it ; so we will not mention 
where the said stream was. After all one stream is very like an- 
other, especially to the multitude who fish and can catch nothing. 



228 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

" "Well, Claude," we said, " you confess yourself baffled with 
this magnificence ? " 

" Yes ! to -paint it worthily one would require to be a Turner, 
a Copley Fielding, and a Creswick, all in one." 

" Well, you shall try your pencil to-day on simpler and severer 
subjects. I can promise you nothing rich, nothing grand, noth- 
ing which will even come under the denomination of that vile 
word " picturesque." But I will show you one scrap of Eng- 
land, left just as it was before either Celt, Cymry, Saxon, or 
Norseman, trod its shores ; and that surely is a sight which may 
give some new notions to a Londoner. And before we reach it, 
why should we not pray to the Maker of it and us to " open our 
eyes, that we may understand the wondrous things of his law," 
— written there all around in the great green book, whose two 
covers are the star vault and the fire kingdoms ; whose leaves 
are the mountain ridges ; whose letters are the oak boughs, and 
the heather bells, and the gnats above the stream ; and the light 
whereby we read it, the simple loving heart which is content to 
go wondering and awe-struck all its days, and find in that mood 
peace, and strength, and wisdom ? " 

"Amen ! " he answered. " ' If thine eye be single, thy whole 
body shall be full of light.' And surely there was never a fitter 
place wherein to offer up such a prayer than in this most glori- 
ous of the rock-aisles of God's island temple of England. For 
here, too, is ' a sanctuary not made with hands ; ' here, too, if 
you will but listen, the earth spirits are praising God night and 
day, with ' voices like the sound of many waters.' " 

"A somewhat narrow and materialist adaptation of Scripture, 
Claude," we rejoined. 

" Heaven forbid ! What is earth but the image of heaven ? 
Does not Solomon tell us, how the things which are seen are the 
doubles of the things which are not seen ? " 

" Did you ever remark," we asked, after a pause, " how such 
unutterable scenes as this gorge of the ' Waters-meet ' stir 
up a feeling of shame, almost of peevishness, before the sense 
of a mysterious meaning which we ought to understand and 
cannot ? " 

He smiled. 

" Our torments do by length of time become our elements ; 
and painful as that sensation is to the earnest artist, he will feel 
it, I fancy, at last sublime itself into an habitually, gentle, rever- 
ent, almost melancholy tone of mind, as of a man bearing the 
burden of an infinite, wonderful message, which his own frivolity 
and laziness hinder him from speaking out ; and it should beget 
in him too " (with a glance at us,) " something of merciful in- 



XOETH DEVON. 229 

diligence towards the stupidity of those who see, after all, only a 
very little shallower than he does into the unfathomable depths 
of nature." 

" You mean," we said, " that we were too hard last night 
upon the poor gentleman who took upon himself to write about 
Exmoor ? " 

u I do indeed. How has he harmed you, or any one but him- 
self? He has gained a few more days' pleasure in his way. 
Let us thank God that he has even so far enjoyed himself, and 
call that fact, as it is, fairly lacro apponendum in the gross sum 
of human happiness." 

u Friend Claude, we are the last to complain of any man's in- 
nocent pleasure, down to the joys of pork and claret. We only 
complain of his putting it into print. Surely the gentlemen of 
England must help, at least, to save her, if she is to be saved, 
from what is happening to every continental nation. And this 
it is, Claude, which makes us so indignant when we see a gen- 
tleman writing a foolish or a vulgar book. Here is a man whose 
education, for aught we know, has cost a thousand pounds or so, 
at home or abroad. Does not such a man, by the very expense 
of him, promise more than this ? And do not our English field- 
sports, which, with the exception of that silly and brutal Irish 
method of gambling called steeple-chasing, we reverence and 
enjoy, — do not they, by the expense of them, promise something 
more than this ? " 

" Well, as I told you last night, sporting books and sportsmen 
seem to me, by their very object, not to be worth troubling our 
heads about. Out of nothing, comes nothing. See, my hands 
are as soft as any lady's in Belgravia. I could not, to save my 
life, lift a hundred weight a foot off the ground ; while you have 
been a wild man of the woods, a leaper of ditches, and a rower 
of races, and a wanton destroyer of all animal life, and yet " 

" You would hint politely that you are as open as ourselves to 
all noble, and chivalrous, and truly manly emotions ? " 

" What think you ? " 

u That you are far worthier in such matters than we, friend. 
But do not forget that it may be your intellect, and your pro- 
fession — in one word, God's mercy, which have steered you 
clear of shoals upon which you will find the mass of our class 
founder. Woe to the class or the nation which has no manly 
physical training ! Look at the manners, the morals, the faces 
of the young men of the shop-keeping classes, if you wish to see 
the effects of utterly neglecting the physicial development of man, 
of fancying that all the muscular activity he requires under the 
sun is to be able to stand behind a counter, or sit on a desk-stool 



230 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

without tumbling off. Be sure, be sure, that ever since the days 
of the Persians of old, effeminacy, if not twin-sister of cowardice 
and dishonesty, has always gone hand in hand with them. To 
that utter neglect of any exercises which call out fortitude, pa- 
tience, self-dependence, and daring, we attribute a great deal of 
the low sensuality, the conceited vulgarity, the utter want of a 
high sense of honour, which prevails just now among the middle 
classes ; and from which the navigator, the engineer, the miner, 
and the sailor, are comparatively free." 

" And perhaps, too, that similar want of any high sense of 
honour, which seems, from the religious periodicals, to pervade a 
large proportion of a certain more venerable profession ? " 

" Seriously, Claude, we believe you are not far wrong. But 
we are getting on delicate ground there : but we have always 
found, that of whatever profession he may be — to travestie 
Shakspeare's words, — 

The man that hath not sporting in his soul, 
Is fit for treason's direst stratagems— — 

and so on." 

" Civil to me!" 

" Oh, you have a sporting soul in you, like hundreds of other 
Englishmen who never handled rod or gun, or you would not be 
steering for Exmoor to-day. But such I have almost invariably 
found to have been men of the very highest intellect. If your 
boy be a genius, you may trusf him to find some original means 
for developing his manly energies, whether in art, agriculture, 
civil engineering, or travels, discovery, and commerce. But if 
he be not, as there are a thousand chances to one he will not be, 
whatever you teach him, let the first two things be, as they were 
with the old Persians, 'To speak the truth, and to draw the 
bow.' " 

By this time we had reached the stream, just clearing from the 
last night's showers. A long, transparent, amber shallow, dimp- 
led with fleeting silver rings by rising trout ; a low cascade of 
green-veined snow T ; a deep, dark pool of swirling orange-brown, 
walled in with heathery rocks, and paved with sandstone slabs 
and boulders, distorted by the changing refractions of the eddies, — 
sight delicious to the angler. 

We commenced our sport at once, while Claude wandered up 
the glen to sketch a knoll of crags, on which a half-wild moor- 
land pony, the only living thing in sight, stood staring and snuf- 
fing at the intruder, his long mane and tail streaming out wildly 
against the sky. 

We had fished on for some hour or two ; Claude had long 
since disappeared among the hills ; we fancied ourselves miles 



NORTH DEVON. 231 

from any human being, when a voice at our elbow startled 
us: — 

" A bleak place for fishing this, sir ! " 

We turned ; it was an old gray-whiskered labouring man, with 
pick and spade on shoulder, who had crept on us unawares be- 
neath the wall of the neighbouring deer-cover. Keen, honest 
eyes, gleamed out from his brown, scarred, weather-beaten face ; 
and as he settled himself against a rock, with the deliberate in- 
tention of a cbat, we commenced by asking after Mr. Knight, 
" The Lord of Stags," well known and honoured both by sports- 
man and by farmer. 

" He was gone to Malta — a warmer place that than Exnioor." 

" What ! have you been in Malta ? " 

" Yes, he had been in Malta, and in stranger places yet. He 
had been a sailor ; he had seen the landing in Egypt, and heard 
the .French cannon thundering vainly from the sandhills on the 
English boats. He had himself helped to lift Abercrombie up the 
ship's side to the death-bed of the brave. He had seen Caraccioli 
hanging at his own yard-arm, and heard Lady Hamilton order 
out the barge herself, and row round the frigate of the murdered 
man, to glut her eyes with her revenge. He had seen, too, the 
ghastly corpse floating upright, when Nelson and the enchantress 
met their victim, returned from the sea-depths to stare at them, 
as Banquo's ghost upon Macbeth. But she was ' a mortal fine 
woman/ was Lady Hamilton, though she was a queer one, and 
4 cruel kind to the sailors ; ' and many a man she saved from 
flogging ; and one from hanging, too ; that was a marine that got 
a-stealing ; for Nelson, though he was kind enough, yet it was a 
word and a blow with him ; and quite right he, sir ; for there be 
such rascals on board ship, that if you arn't as sharp with them 
as with wild beastesses, no man's fife, nor the ship's neither, would 
be worth a day's purchase." 

So he, with his simple straight-forward notions of right and 
wrong, worth much maudlin wranerciful indulgence which we 
hear in these days, — and yet not going to the bottom of the mat- 
ter either, as we shall see in the next war. But, rambling on, 
he told me how he had come home, war-worn and crippled, to 
marry a wife and get tall sons, and lay his bones in his native 
village ; till which time, (for death to the aged poor man is a 
Sabbath, of which he talks freely, calmly, even joyously,) " he 
just got his bread, by Mr. Knight's kindness, patching and mend- 
ing at the stone deer-fences." 

We gave him something to buy tobacco, and watched him as 
he crawled away, with a sort of stunned surprise. And he had 
actually seen Nelson sit by Lady Hamilton ! It was so strange, 



232 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

to have that gay Italian bay, with all its memories,— the orgies 
of Baise, and the unbnried wrecks of ancient towns, with the 
smoking crater far above ; and the world-famous Nile-mouths, 
and those great old wars, big with the destinies of the world ; and 
those great old heroes, with their awful deeds for good and evil, 
all brought so suddenly and livingly before us, up there in the 
desolate moorland, where the deer, and birds, and heath, and 
rushes, were even as they had been from the beginning. Like 
Wordsworth with his Leech- Gatherer, (a poem which we, in 
spite of laughter, will rank among his very highest,) — 

While he was talking thus, the lonely place, 
The old man's shape, and speech — all troubled me: 
In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace 
About the weary moors continually, 
Wandering about alone and silently. 

Just then we heard a rustle, and turning, saw Claude toiling 
down to us over the hill-side. He joined us, footsore and weary, 
but in great excitement ; for the first minute or two he could not 
speak, and at last, — 

" Oh, I have seen such a sight ! — but I will tell you how it all 
was. After I left you I met a keeper. He spoke civilly to me — 
you know my antipathy to game and those who live thereby, but 
there was a wild, bold, self-helping look about him and his gun 
alone there in the waste — And after all he was a man and a 
brother. Well, we fell into talk, and fraternized ; and at last he 
offered to take me to a neighbouring hill and show me ' sixty 
head of red-deer all together : ' and as he spoke he looked quite 
proud of his words. ' I was lucky, 5 he said, * to come just then, 
for in another week the stags would all have lost their heads.' 
At which speech I wondered ; but was silent, and followed him, 
I, Claude the Cockney, such a walk as I shall never take again. 
Behold these trousers — behold these hands ! scratched to pieces 
by crawling on all-fours through the heather. But I saw them." 

" A sight worth many pairs of plaid trousers ? " 

" Worth Saint Chrysostom's seven years' nakedness on all- 
fours ! And so I told the fellow, who. by some cunning calculations 
about wind, and sun, and so forth, which he imparted to my un- 
comprehending* ears, brought me suddenly to the top of a little 
crag, below which, some sixty yards off, the whole herd stood, 
stags, hinds — but I can't describe them. I have not brought 
away a scrap of sketch, though we watched them full ten minutes 
undiscovered ; and then the stare, and the toss of those antlers, 
and the rush ! That broke the. spell with me ; for I had been 
staring stupidly at them, trying in vain to take in the wonder, 
with the strangest new excitement heaving and boiling up in my 



NORTH DEVON. 233 

throat, and at the sound of their hoofs on the turf I woke, and 
found the keeper staring, not at them, but at me, down whose 
cheeks the tears were running in streams." 

" ' Arn't you well, sir ? ' said he. ' You needn't be afeard ; 
it's only at the fall of the year the stags is wicked.' 

" I don't know what I answered at first ; but the fellow under- 
stood me when I shook his hand frantically and told him that I 
should thank him to the last day of my life, and that I would not 
have missed it for a thousand pounds. In part-proof whereof I 
gave him a sovereign on the spot, which seemed to clear my 
character in his eyes, as much as the crying at the sight of a herd 
of deer had mystified it." 

" Claude, well-beloved," said we, " will you ever speak con- 
temptuously of sportsmen any more ? " 

u Do manus, I have been vilifying them, as one does most 
things in the world, only for want of understanding them. I will 
go back to town, and take service with Edwin Landseer, as 
colour-grinder, footboy, anything." 

" You will then be very near to a very great poet," quoth we, 
" and one whose works will become, as centuries roll on, more 
and more valuable to art, to science, and, as we think also, to 
civilization, and to Religion." 

" I begin now to guess your meaning," answered Claude. 

And thereon commenced a discussion, which it is not expedient 
at this time to report in Fraser, as it was rather a wild-goose 
chase for truths, in a vast, new field of thought, than any satis- 
factory carrying home and cooking of the same. 

" So we lounged, and dreamt, and fished, in heathery High- 
land," as the author of The Bothie would say, while the summer 
snipes flitted whistling up the shallow before us, and the soft, 
southeastern clouds slid lazily across the sun, and the little trout 
snapped and dimpled at a tiny partridge hackle, with a twist of 
orange silk, whose elegance of shape and colour reconciled 
Claude's heart somewhat to our everlasting whipping of the 
water. When at last : — 

" You seem to have given up catching any thing. You have 
not stirred a fish in these last two pools, except that little saucy 
yellow shrimp, who jumped over your fly, and gave a spiteful 
slap at it with his tail." 

Too true ; and what could be the cause ? Had that impudent 
sandpiper frightened all the fish on his way up ? Had an otter 
paralyzed them with terror for the morning ? Or had a stag 
been down to drink? We saw the fresh slot .of his broad claws, 
by the by, in the mud a few yards back. 

" We must have seen the stag himself, if he had been here 
lately," said Claude. 



234 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

" Mr. Landseer knows too well by this time that that is a non 
sequitur" 

" I'm no more a non sequitur than you are/' answered the 
Cornish magistrate to the barrister. 

" Fish and deer, friend, see us purblind sons of men, somewhat 
more quickly than we see them, fear sharpening the senses. Per- 
haps, after all, the fault is in your staring white straw hat, a gar- 
ment which has spoilt many a good day's fishing. Ah, no ! there 
is the cause ; the hat of a mightier than you — the thunder-spirit 
himself. Thor is bringing home his bride ; while the breeze, 
awe-stricken, falls dead calm before his march. Behold, climb- 
ing above that eastern ridge, his huge powdered cauliflower-wig, 
barred with a gray horizontal handkerchief of mist," 

" Oh, profane and uncomely simile ! But what is the mystery 
of his bride ? " 

" Know r you not, O Symbolist, that the law of sex, which holds 
good "throughout all nature, is seen in the thunderstorm ? Look 
at that vast gray ragged fan of mist which spreads up, higher 
and higher every moment, round the hard masses of the posi- 
tively electric thunder-pillar. Those are the torn and streaming 
robes of that poor maiden, the negatively-electric or female cloud, 
whom Thor is bearing off, till some fit bridal-bed of hills shall 
attract hj.m on Brendon or Oare-Oak, whereon he may fill her 
with his fiery might, and celebrate his nuptials in jubilant roars 
of thunder." 

" And then, O Bombastes, we may except to feel the icy tears 
of the cold, coy maiden, pattering down in the form of a storm 
of hail ! " 

" Which is here already. Flee, oh, flee to yonder pile of crags, 
and thank your stars that there is one at hand ! For these moun- 
tain tornadoes are at once tropic in their ferocity and Siberian in 
their cutting cold." 

Down it came. The browm hills vanished in white sheets of 
hail, first falling perpendicular, then slanting and driving furiously 
before the clod blast which issued from the storm. The rock 
above us rang with the thunder-peals, and the lightning, which 
might have fallen miles away, seemed to our dazzled eyes to dive 
into the glittering river at our feet. We sat silent some half-hour, 
listening to the voice of One more mighty than ourselves ; and it 
was long after the uproar had rolled away among the hills, and 
a steady, sighing sheet of warmer rains, from banks of low gray 
fog, had succeeded the rattling of the hail upon the crisp 
heather, that we turned to Claude. 

" And now, since your heart is softened toward these wild, 
stag-hunting, trout-fishing, jovial west-countrymen, we will give 



NORTH DEVON. 235 

you a ballad which sprung up in us once, when fishing among 
these very hills. It expresses feelings not yet extinct in the 
minds of a large portion of the lower orders, as you would know 
had you lived, like ourselves, all your life in poaching counties, 
and on the edges of one forest after another, — feelings which 
must be satisfied, even in the highest development of the civili- 
zation of the future, for they are innate in every thoughtful and 
energetic race, — feelings which, though they have often led to 
crime, have far oftener delivered from hoggish sensuality ; the 
feelings which drove into the merry greenwood ' Robin Hood, 
Scarlet, and John ; ' ' Adam Bell, and Clym of the Cleugh, and 
William of Cloudeslee ; ' feelings which prompted one half of his 
inspiration to the nameless immortal who wrote the Nutbrown 
Maid, — feelings which could not then and cannot now be satis- 
fied by the drudgery of a barbaric agriculture, which, without 
science, economy, or enterprise, offers no food for the higher instincts 
of the human mind, its yearnings after Nature and freedom, and 
the noble excitement of self-dependent energy. We threw it 
into the Scotch dialect, because it is, indeed, the classic one for 
such subjects, as the Doric was for certain among the Greeks ; 
for deeply as we Southrons have felt upon these matters we are 
a dumb people, and our Norse brethren of the border have had 
to speak for us and for themselves, and monopolize the whole of 
our ballad literature ; and though we will not go as far as Sir 
Walter Scott in asserting that there never was a genuine ballad 
written south of Tweed, there is little doubt that few ever rose 
above doggerel which were written south of Trent, — that is, 
beyond the line which bounds the impregnation of the Saxon by 
the more intellectual and fiery Norse race. Will you hear it ? " — 

Oh, I wadna be a yeoman, mither, to follow my father's trade, 
To bow my back in miry fallows over plough, and hoe, and spade. 
Stinting wife, and bairns, and kye, to fat some courtier lord, — 
Let them die o' rent wha like-, mither, and I'll die by sword. 

Nor I wadna be a clerk, mither, to bide aye ben, 
Scrabbling aye on sheets o' parchment with a weary, weary pen, 
Looking through the lang stane windows at a narrow strip b' sky, 
Like a laverock in a withy cage, until I pine away and die. 

Nor I wadna be the merchant, mither, in his langfurred gown, 
Trailing strings o' footsore horses through the noisy, dusty town ; 
Louting low to knights and ladies, fumbling o'er his wares, 
Telling lies, and scraping siller, heaping cares on cares. 

Nor I wadna be a soldier, mither, to dice wi' ruffian bands, 

Pining weary months in castles, looking over wasted lands, 

Smoking byres, and shrieking women, and the grewsome sights o' war, — 

There's blood orT'my hand eneugh, mither — it's ill to make it mair. 



236 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

If I had married a wife, mither, I might ha' been douce and still, 
And sat at hame be the ingle-side to crack and laugh my fill, 
Sat at hame wi' the woman I looed, and bairnies at my knee, — 
But death is bauld, and age is cauld, and luve 's no for me. 

For when first I stirred in" your side, mither, you ken full well 
How you lay all night up among the deer on the open fell; 
And so it was that I got the heart to wander far and near, 
Caring neither for land nor lassie, but the bonny dun deer. 

Yet I am not a lozel and idle, mither, nor a thief that steals ; 
I do but hunt God's cattle, upon God's ain hills: 
For no man buys and sells the deer, and the fells are free 
To a knight that carries hawk and spurs, and a hind like me. 

So I'm aff and away to the muirs, mither, to hunt the deer, 

Hanging far fra frowning faces, and the douce folk here ; 

Crawling up through burn and bracken, louping madly down the screes, 

Speering out fra craig and headland, drinking up the simmer breeze. 

Oh, the wafts o' heather honey, and the music o' the brae, 

As I watch the great harts feeding, nearer, nearer a' the day ! 

Oh, to hark the eagle screaming, sweeping, ringing round the sky ! — 

That's a bonnier life than stumbling owre the muck to hog and kye! 

And when I am taen and-hangit, mither, a brittling o' my deer, 
Ye'll no leave your bairn to the corbie craws to dangle in the air? 
But ye'll send up my twa douce brethren, and ye'll steal me fra the tree, 
And bury me up on the brown, brown muirs, where I aye loved to be. 

Ye'll bury me 'twixt the brae and the burn, in a glen far away, 
Where I may hear the heathcock craw and the great harts bray; 
And if my ghaist can walk, mither, I'll sit glowering at the sky, 
The live long night on the black hill-sides where the dun deer lie. 

The ballad ended, but the rain did not ; and we were at last 
fain to leave our shelter, and let ourselves be blown by the gale 
(the difficulty being not to progress forward, but to keep our feet) 
back to the shed where our ponies were tied, and canter home to 
Lynmouth, with the rain cutting our faces like showers of peb- 
bles, and our little mountain ponies staggering before the wind, 
with their long tails about our ears, and more than once, if Lon- 
doners will believe us, blown sheer up against the bank by some 
mad gust, which rushed perpendicularly, not down, but up, the 
vast chasms of the glens below. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE COAST LINE. 

It is four o'clock on a May morning, and Claude and ourselves 
are just embarking on board a Clovelly trawling-skiff, which, hav- 
ing disposed of her fish at various ports along the Channel, is about 
to run leisurely .homewards with an ebb tide, and a soft north- 



NORTH DEVON. 237 

easterly breeze ; and we expect, gentle reader, the pleasure of 
your most polished and intellectual society. If you should prove 
a bad sailor, which Heaven forfend, you may still lie on deck, 
and listen — half-sleepy, half-envious — to our rhapsodies, and to 
the ruthless clatter of our knives and forks : but we will forestall 
no sorrows, — we will speak no words but of good omen. 

So farewell, fair Lynmouth ; and ye mountain storm-spirits, 
send us a propitious day, and dismiss those fantastic clouds which 
are coquetting with your thrones, crawling down one mountain 
face, and whirling and leaping up another, in wreaths of snow, 
and dun, and amber, pierced every minute by some long, glitter- 
ing, upward arrow from the level sun, which gilds gray crags and 
downs a thousand feet above us, while underneath the mountain 
gorges still sleep black and cold in shade. 

There, they have heard us ! the cap rises off that " summer- 
house hill," that eight hundred feet of upright wall, which seems 
ready to topple down into the nest of bemyrtled cottages at its 
foot ; and as we sweep out into the deeper water the last mist- 
flake streams up from the Foreland and vanishes in white threads 
into the stainless blue. 

" Look at the colours of that Foreland ! " cried Claude, in 
ecstasy. "The vast, simple monotone of pearly green, broken 
only at intervals by blood-red stains, where the turf has slipped 
and left the fresh rock bare, and all glimmering softly through a 
delicate blue haze, like the bloom on a half-ripened plum ! " 

" And look, too, how the gray pebble beach is already dancing 
and quivering in the mirage which steams up, like the hot breath 
of a limekiln, from the drying stones ! Talk of ' glazings and 
scumblings,' ye artists ! and bungle at them as you will, what are 
they to Nature's own glazings, deepening every instant there be- 
hind us?" 

" Mock me not. I have walked up and down here with a 
humbled and a broken spirit, and had nearly forsworn the audac- 
ity of painting any thing beyond a beech stem, or a frond of fern." 

" The little infinite in them would have baffled you just as 
much as the only somewhat bigger infinite of the hills on which 
they grow." 

" Confest : and so farewell to unpaintable Lynmouth ! Fare- 
well to the charming contrast of civilized English landscape-gar- 
dening, with its villas, and its exotics, and its evergreens, thus 
strangely, and yet harmoniously, confronted with the mad chaos 
of the rocks and mountain-streams. Those grounds of Sir Wil- 
liam Herries's are a double paradise, the wild Eden of the Past 
side by side with the cultivated Eden of the Future. How its 
alternations of Art and Savagery at once startle and relieve the 



238 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

sense, as you pass suddenly out of wildernesses of piled boulders, 
and torrent-shattered trees, and the roar of a hundred fern-fringed 
waterfalls, into ' trim walks, and fragrant alleys green,' and the 
door of a summer-house transports you at a step from Richmond 
to the Alps. Happy he who ' possesses,' as the world calls it, 
and happier still he whose taste could organize, that fairy 
bower." 

So he, magniloquently, as was his wont ; and yet his declama- 
tions always flowed with such a graceful ease, — a simple, smiling 
earnestness, — an unpractised melody of voice, that what would 
have been rant from other lips, from his showed only as the 
healthy enthusiasm of the passionate, all-seeing, all-loving artist. 

But our companion the reader, has been some time gazing up 
at that huge boulder-strewn hiil-side above us, and wondering 
whether the fable of the giants be not true after all, — and that 
" Yale of Rocks," hanging five hundred feet in air, with all its 
crag-castles, and tottering battlements, and colossal crumbling 
idols, and great blocks, which hang sloping, caught in act to fall, 
be not some enormous Cyclopean temple left half-disinterred. 

" A fragment of old Chaos," said Claude, " left unorganized, — 
or, perhaps, the waste heap of the world, where, after the rest of 
England had been made, some angel put up a notice for his fel- 
lows, ' Dry rubbish shot here.' " 

" Not so, unscientific ! It is the grandfather of hills, — a fossil 
bone of some old continent, which stood here ages before England 
was. And the great earth-angel, who grinds up mountains into 
paint, as you do bits of ochre, for his ' Continental Sketches,' found 
in it the materials for a whole dark ground-tone of coal-measures, 
and a few hundred miles of warm high-lights, which we call New 
Red Sandstone. 

" And what a sea-wall they are, these Exmore hills ! Sheer 
upward from the sea a thousand feet rises the mountain range ; 
and as we slide and stagger lazily along before the dying breeze, 
through the deep water which never leaves the cliff, the eye 
ranges, almost dizzy, up some five hundred feet of rock, dappled 
with every hue, from the intense black of the tide line, through 
the warm green and brown shadows, out of which the horizontal 
cracks of the strata, and the loom black, and the breeding gulls, 
show like lingering snow-flakes up to the middle cliff, where deli- 
cate grays fade into pink, pink into red, red into glowing purple, 
and the purple is streaked with glossy ivy wreaths, and black- 
green yews ; and all the choir of colours stop abruptly on the 
mid-hill, to give place to one yellowish-gray sheet of upward 
down, sweeping smooth and unbroken, except by a lonely stone, 
or knot of clambering sheep, to end in one great rounded waving 



NORTH DEVON. 239 

line, sharp-cut against the brilliant blue. The sheep hang like 
white daisies upon the steep hill-side, and a solitary falcon rides a 
speck in air, yet far below the crest of that tall hill. Now he 
sinks to the cliff edge, and hangs quivering, supported like a kite, 
by the pressure of his breast and long-carved wings, against the 
breeze. 

"There he hangs, the peregrine, — a true 6 falcon gentle,' ' sharp- 
notched, long-taloned, crooked-winged,' whose uncles and cousins, 
ages ago, have struck at roe and crane, and sat upon the wrists 
of kings. And now he is full proud of any mouse or cliff-lark ; 
like an old Chingachgook, last of the Mohicans, he lingers round 
' the hunting-field of his fathers.' " So all things end. 

The old order changeth, giving place to the new; 

And God fulfils himself in many ways, 

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 

" Ay, and the day shall come," said Claude, " when the brows 
of that huge High-Vere shall be crowned with golden wheat, 
and every rock-ledge on Trentishoe, like those of Petra and the 
Rhine, support its garden-bed of artificial soil." 

" And when," we answered, " the shingley sides of that great 
chasm of Headon's Mouth shall be clothed with the white mul- 
berry, and the summer limestone-skiffs shall go back freighted 
with fabrics which vie with the finest woof of Italy and Lyons." 

u You believe, then, in Mrs. Whitby of Lymington ? " 

" Seeing is believing, Claude : through laughter, and failures, 
and the stupidity of half-barbarous clods, she has persevered in 
her silk-growing, and succeeded ; and we should like to afficher 
her book to the doors of every west-country squire." 

" Better require them to pass an examination in it, and seve- 
ral other better-known things, before they take possession of their 
estates. In the mean time, what is that noble conical hill, which 
has increased my wonder at the infinite variety of beauty which 
The Spirit can produce by combinations so simple as a few gray 
stones and a sheet of turf 'i " 

" The Hangman." 

" An ominous name. What is its history ? " 

" Some sheep-stealer, they say, clambering over a wall with 
his booty slung round his neck, was literally hung by the poor 
brute's struggles, and found days after on the mountain-side, a 
blackened corpse suspended on one side of the wall, with the 

sheep hanging on the other, and the ravens . You may fill 

up the picture for yourself." 

But, see, as we round the Hangman, w T hat a change of scene ! 
The huge square-blocked sandstone cliffs dip suddenly under 
dark slate-beds, fantastically bent and broken by primeval earth- 



240 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

quakes. Wooded combes, and broken ridges of rich pasture- 
land, wander and slope towards a labyrinth of bush-fringed coves, 
black isolated tide-rocks, and land-locked harbours. There shines 
among the woods the castle of Watermouth, on its lovely little 
salt-water loch, the safest harbour on the coast; and there is 
Combe-Martin, mile-long man-stye, which seven centuries of 
fruitless silver-mining, and of the right (now deservedly lost) of 
" sending a talker to the national palaver," have neither cleansed 
nor civilized. Turn, turn thy head away, dear reader, lest even 
at this distance some foul odour taint the summer airs, and com- 
plete the misfortune already presaged by that pale, sad face, sick- 
ening in the burning calm ! For this great sun-roasted fire-brick 
of the Exmore range is fairly " burning up the breeze," and we 
have nothing but the tide to drift us slowly down to Ilfracombe. 

Now we open Rillage, and now Hillsborough, two of the most 
picturesque of headlands ; see how their huge round foreheads of 
glistening gray shale sink down into two dark, jagged moles, run- 
ning far out to seaward, and tapering off, each into a long, black 
horizontal line, vanishing at last beneath its lace-fringe of restless 
hissing foam. How grand the contrast of the delicate severe 
lightness of those sea-lines, with the vast solid mass which rests 
upon them ! Look, too, at the glaring lights and the Tartarean 
shadows of those gloomy chasms and caves, which the tide never 
leaves, or the foot of man explores ; and hark, at every rush of 
the long ground-swell, mysterious mutterings, solemn sighs, sud- 
den thunders, as of a pent-up earthquake, boom out of them 
across the glassy swell. Look at those blasts of delicate vapour 
that shoot up from hidden rifts, and hang a moment, and vanish ; 
and those green columns of wave which rush mast high up the 
perpendicular walls, and then fall back and outwards in a water- 
fall of foam, lacing the black rocks with a thousand snowy streams. 
There they fall, and leap, and fall again. And so they did yes- 
terday, and the day before, — and so they did centuries ago, when 
the Danes swept past them, for the loss of the magic raven flag, 
battle-worn, and sad of heart, from the fight at Appledore, to sit 
down and starve on " the island of Bradanrelice, which men call 
Flat Holms ! " Ay, and even so they leapt and fell, before a sail 
gleamed on the Severn sea, when the shark and the ichthyosaur 
paddled beneath the shade of tropic forests, — now scanty turf 
and golden gorse. And so they will leap and fall on, on, through 
the centuries and the ages. Oh dim abyss of Time, into which 
we peer shuddering, what will be the end of thee, and of this 
ceaseless coil and moan of waters ? Is it true, that when thou 
shalt be no more, then, too, " there shall be no more sea ; " and 
this ocean bed, this great grave of fertility, into which all earth's 



NORTH DEVON. 241 

wasted riches stream, day and night, from hill and town, shall rise 
and become fruitful soil, corn-field and meadow-land ; and earth 
shall teem as thick with living men, as bean-fields with the 
summer bees ? What a consummation ! At least there is One 
greater than sea, or time : and the Judge of all the earth will do 
right. 

But there is Ilfracombe, with its rock-walled harbour, its little 
wood of masts within, its white terraces, rambling up the hills, 
and its capstone sea- walk, the finest " marine parade," as flunky- 
dom terms it, in all England, except that splendid Hoe at Ply- 
mouth, " Lam Goemagot," Gog-magog's leap, as the old Britons 

called it, where Corineus , but no, gentle Editor, we will 

wander no more. And there is the little isolated rock-chapel, 
where seven hundred years ago, our west-country forefathers 
used to go to pray St. Nicholas for deliverance from shipwreck, 
— a method lovingly regretted by Mr. Titmarsh's friend, the 
Rev. L. Oriel, of St. Waltheof 's, as a " pious idea of the Ages of 
faith." Claude, however, prefers the present method of light- 
houses and the worthy Trinity Board, as more godly, and faith- 
ful, as well as more useful ; and, we suspect, so do the sailors 
themselves. 

But our reader is by this time nearly sick of the roasting calm, 
and the rolling ground-swell, and the smell of fish, and is some- 
what sleepy also, between early rising and incoherent sermons ; 
wherefore, dear reader, we advise you to stay and recruit your- 
self at Ilfracombe, before you proceed further with, your self- 
elected cicerone on the grand tour of North Devon. Believe us, 
you will not stir from the place for a month at least. For be 
sure, if you are sea-sick, or heart-sick, or pocket-sick either, there 
is no pleasanter or cheaper place of cure (to indulge in a puff, of 
a species now well-nigh obsolete, the puff honest and true) than 
this same Ilfracombe, with its quiet nature and its quiet luxury, 
its rock fairy-land and its sea-walks, its downs and combes, its 
kind people, and, if possible, still kinder climate, which combines 
the soft warmth of South Devon with the bracing freshness of 
the Welsh mountains ; where winter has slipped out of the list 
of the seasons, and mother Earth makes up for her summer's 
luxury by fasting, " not in sackcloth and ashes, but in new silk 
and old sack ; " and instead of standing three months chin deep 
in ice, and christening great snowballs its " friend and family," 
as St. Fransis of Assizi did of old, knows no severer asceticism 
than tepid shower-baths, and a parasol of soft grey mist. 

So farewell. True, you have seen but half North Devon. 
But, alas ! the pages of Fraser are of paper, not of India-rubber ; 
and when men write of places which they love, their ink-stream 
11 



242 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

is as the letting out of waters ; and other people are long-winded, 
besides Nestor and Mr. Chisholm Anstey. Wherefore our wise 
Editor, that intellectual Soyer, and infallible caterer, for the pub- 
lic appetite, practised to foresee afar the slightest chance of an 
sesthetie surfeit, has for your sakes treated us as schoolboys treat 
slow- worms, — made us break off our own tail, for the pleasure of 
seeing it grow again. 



PART II. 
I. MORTE. 



I had been wandering over the southern side of Exmoor, 
marking my track with heaps of slaughtered trout, through a 
country which owes its civilization and tillage to the genius of 
one man, who has found stag-preserving by no means incompati- 
ble with the most magnificent agricultural improvement, among 
a population who still evince an unpleasant partiality for cutting 
and carrying farmers' crops by night without leave or license, and 
for housebreaking after the true classic method of Athens, by 
fairly digging holes through the house walls — a little nook of 
primeval savagery, fast reorganizing itself under the Gospel and 
scientific farming. I had been on Dartmoor, too ; but of that 
noble mountain range so much has been said and sung of late, 
that I really am afraid it is becoming somewhat cockney and 
trite. So what I have to say thereupon may well wait for 
another opportunity. 

Opposite me at the Clarence sat Claude Mellot, just beginning 
to bloom again into cheerfulness, after the purgatory of the pre- 
vious day in the Channel lop and the Swansea steamer, his port- 
folio stuffed with sketches of South Wales, which, as I told him, 
he might as well have left behind him, seeing that half-a-dozen 
of Turner's pictures have told the public as much about the 
scenery of Siluria as they ever need know, and ten times more 
than they ever will understand. 

We were on the point of starting for Morte, and so round to 
Saunton Court and the sands beyond it, where a Clovelly traw- 
ler, which I had chartered for the occasion, had promised to send 
a boat on shore and take us off, provided the wind lay off the 
land. 

But, indeed, the sea was calm as glass, the sky cloudless 
azure ; and the doubt was not whether we should be able to get 



NORTH DEVON. 243 

on board through the surf, but whether, having got on board, we 
should not lie till nightfall, as idle 

As a painted ship 
Upon a painted ocean. 

And now behold us on our way up lovely combes, with their 
green copses, and ridges of rock, and golden furze, fruit-laden orch- 
ards, and slopes of emerald pasture, pitched as steep as house- 
roofs, where the red long-horns are feeding, with their tails a 
yard above their heads, and under us, seen in bird's-eye view, 
the ground-plans of the little snug farms and homesteads of the 
Damnonii, "dwellers in the valley," as we West-countrymen 
were called of old. Now we are leaving them far below us ; and 
the blue hazy sea is showing far above the serrated ridge of the 
Tors, and their huge bank of sunny green ; and before us is a 
desolate table-land of rushy pastures and mouldering banks, fes- 
tooned with the delicate network of the little ivy-leaved campa- 
nula, loveliest of British wild-flowers, fit with its hair-like stems 
and tiny bells of blue, to wreathe the temples of Titania. Alas ! 
we have passed out of the world into limbus patrum, and the 
region of ineffectually and incompleteness. The only cultiva- 
tors here, and through tens of thousands of acres in the North of 
Devon, are the rook and mole ; and yet the land is rich enough 
— the fat deep crumbling of the shale and iron-stone, returning 
year by year into the mud, from whence it hardened ages ago. 
There are scores of farms of far worse land in mid-England, 
under " a four-course shift," yielding their load of wheat an acre. 
When will this land do as much ? When will the spirit of Smith 
of Deanston, and Hewitt Davies, descend on North Devon ? 
When will that true captain of industry, and new Theseus of the 
nineteenth century, Mr. Warnes of Trimmingham, teach the peo- 
ple here to annihilate poor-rates by growing flax upon some of 
the finest flax land, and in the finest flax climate, that we have in 
England ? The shrewd Cornishmen of Launceston and Bodmin 
have awakened long ago to " the new gospel of fertility." When 
will North Devon awake ? 

" When landlords and farmers," said Claude, "at last acknowl- 
edge their divine vocation, and feel it a noble and holy duty to 
produce food for God's people of England — when they learn that 
to grow rushes where they might grow corn, ay, to grow four 
quarters of wheat where they might grow five, is to sin against 
God's blessings and against the English nation. No wonder that 
sluggards like these cry out for protection — that those who can- 
not take care of the land feel that they themselves need artificial 
care." 



244 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

" We will not talk politics, Claude. The present ministry has 
made them pro tempore an extinct science. ' Let the dead bury 
their dead.' The social questions are nowadays becoming far 
more important than the House of Commons ones." 

" There does seem here and there," he said, " some sign of 
improvement. I see the paring plough at work on one field and 
another." 

" Swift goes the age, and slowly crawls improvement. The 
greater part of that land will be only broken up to be exhausted 
by corn-crop after corn-crop, till it can bear no more, and the 
very manure which is drawn home from it in the shape of a few 
turnips will be wasted by every rain of heaven, and the straw 
probably used to mend bad places in the road with; while the 
land returns to twenty years of worse sterility than ever 

" Yeather did zo, and gramfer did zo, and why shouldn't Jean 
do the zame ? " * * * * * * 

" But here is Morte below us. ' The little gray church on the 
windy shore,' which once belonged to William de Tracy, one of 
your friend Thomas a Becket's murderers. If you wish to vent 
your wrath against those who cut off your favourite Saxon hero, 
there is a tomb in the church which bears De Tracy's name, over 
which rival Dryasdusts contend fiercely with paper-arrows : the 
one party asserting that he became a priest, and died here in the 
wilderness ; the others, that the tomb is of later date, that he 
fled hence to Italy, under favour of a certain easy-going Bishop 
of Exeter, and died penitent and duly shriven, according to the 
attestations of a certain or uncertain bishop of Cosenza." 

" Peace be with him and with the bishop ! The flight to Italy 
seems a very needless precaution to a man who owned this cor- 
ner of the world. A bailiff would have had even less chance 
here then than in Connemara a hundred years ago." 

" He certainly would have fed the crabs and rock-cod in two 
hours after his arrival. Nevertheless, I believe the Cosenza 
story is the safer one." 

" Tweedledum is sometimes slightly superior to Tweedledee. 
But what a chaos of rock-ridges ! — old starved mother Earth's 
bare-worn ribs and joints peeping out through every field and 
down ; and on three sides of us the sullen thunder of the unseen 
surge. What a place for some ' gloom-pampered man ' to sit 
and misanthropize ! " 

"Morte, says the Devonshire proverb, is the place on earth 
which heaven made last, and the devil will take first." 

" All the fitter for a misanthrope. But where are the trees ? 
I have not seen one for the last four miles." 

"Nor will you for a few miles more. Whatever will grow 



NORTH DEVON. 245 

here (and most things will) they will not, except, at least, here- 
after the sea-pine of the Biscay shore. You would know why, 
if you had ever felt a southwesterly gale here, when the foam- 
flakes are flying miles inland, and you are fain to cling breathless 
to bank and bush, if you want to get one look at those black 
fields of shark's-tooth tide-rocks, champing and churning the 
great green rollers into snow. Wild folk are these here, gather- 
ers of shell-fish and laver, and merciless to wrecked vessels, 
which they consider as their own by immemorial usage, or rather 
right divine. Significant, how an agricultural people is generally 
as cruel to wrecked seamen as a fishing one is merciful. I could 
tell you twenty stories of the baysmen down there to the west- 
ward risking themselves like very heroes to save strangers' lives, 
and beating off the labouring folk who swarmed down for plun- 
der from the inland hills." 

" Knowledge, you see, breeds sympathy and love. But what 
a merciless coast ! " 

" Hardly a winter without a wreck or two. You see there lying 
about the timbers of more than one tall ship. You see, too, that- 
black rock a-wash far out at sea, apparently a submarine outlier 
of the north horn of this vast rock-amphitheatre below us. That 
is the Morte stone, the ' Death-rock,' as the Normans christened 
it of old ; and it does not belie its name even now. See how, 
even in this calm, it hurls up its column of spray at every wave ; 
and then conceive being entrapped between it and the cliffs, on 
some blinding, whirling winter's night, when the land is shrouded 
thick in clouds, and the roar of the breakers hardly precedes by 
a minute the crash of your bows against the rocks." 

" I never think, on principle, of things so painful, and yet so 
irrelievable. Yet why does not your much-admired Trinity 
House erect a light there ? " 

" So ask the sailors ; for it is indeed one of the gateway-jambs 
of the Channel, and the deep water and the line of coast tempts 
all craft to pass as close to it as possible." 

" Look at the noble sheet of yellow sand below us now, 
banked to the inland with sandhills and sunny downs, and ending 
abruptly at the foot of that sombre wall of slatehill, which runs 
out like a huge pier into the sea some two miles off." 

" That is Woollacombe ; but here on our right is a sight worth 
seeing. Every gully and creek there among the rocks is yellow, 
but not with sand. Those are shells, the sweepings of the ocean 
bed for miles around, piled there, millions upon millions yards 
deep, in every stage of destruction. There they lie grinding to 
dust ; and every gale brings in fresh myriads from the inexhausti- 
ble sea-world, as if Death could be never tired of devouring, or 



246 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

God of making. The brain grows dizzy and tired, as one's feet 
crunch over the endless variety of their forms — and then one 
recollects that every one of them has been a living thing-^a 
whole history of birth, and growth, and propagation, and death. 
Waste it cannot be, or cruelty on the part of the Maker, but 
why this infinite development of life, apparently only to furnish 
out of it now and then a cartload of shellsand to these lazy 
farmers ? " 

" After all, there is not so much life in all those shells put 
together as in one little child, and it may die the hour that it is 
born ! What we call life is but appearance ; the true life 
belongs only to spirits. And whether or not we, or the sea-shell 
there, are at any given moment helping to make up part of some 
pretty little pattern in this kaleidoscope called earth ; yet ' in the 
spirit all live to Him, and shall do so for ever." 

And thereon he rambled off into a long lecture on " species- 
spirits," and " individual-spirits," and " personal-spirits," doubtless 
most important. But I, what between the sun, the luncheon, 
and the metaphysic, sank into soft slumbers, from which I was 
only awakened by the carriage stopping, according to our order, 
on the top of Saunton hill. 

We left the fly, and wandered down towards the old gabled 
" court," nestling amid huge walnuts in its southward glen ; 
while before us spread a panorama, half sea, half land, than 
which, perhaps our England owns no lovelier. 

At our feet was a sea of sand — for the half-mile to the right 
smooth as a floor, bounded by a broad band of curling waves, 
which crept slowly shorewards with the advancing tide. Right 
underneath us the sand was drifted for miles into fantastic hills, 
which quivered in the heat, the glaring yellow of its lights check- 
ered by delicate pink shadows and sheets of gray-green bent. 
To the left were rich alluvial marshes, covered with red cattle 
sleeping in the sun, and laced with creeks and flowery dykes ; 
and here and there a scarlet line, which gladdened Claude's eye 
as being " a bit of positive colour in the foreground," and ours, 
because they were draining- tiles. Beyond again, two broad 
tide-rivers, spotted with white and red brown sails, gleamed like 
avenues of silver, past knots of gay dwellings, and tall lighthouses, 
and church-towers, and wandered each on its own road, till they 
vanished among the wooded hills. On the eastern horizon the 
dark range of Exmoor sank gradually into lower and more broken 
ridges, which rolled away, woodland beyond woodland, till all 
outlines seem lost in purple haze ; while, far beyond, the granite 
peaks of Dartmoor hung like a delicate blue cloud, and enticed 
the eye away into infinity. From thence, as our eyes swept 



NORTH DEVON. 247 

round the horizon, the broken hills above the river's mouth 
gradually rose into the table-land of the " barren coal-measures " 
some ten miles off, — a long straight wall of cliffs which bounded 
the broad bay, buried in deepest shadow, except where the open- 
ing of some glen revealed far depths of sunlit wood. A faint 
perpendicular line of white houses, midway along the range, 
marked our destination ; and far to the westward, the land ended 
sheer and suddenly at the cliffs of Hartland, the " Promontory 
of Hercules," as the old Romans called it, to reappear some ten 
miles out in the Atlantic, in the blue flat-topped island of Lundy, 
so exactly similar in height and form to the opposite cape, that 
it required no scientific imagination to supply the vast gap 
which the primaeval currents had sawn out. There it all lay be- 
neath us like a map ; its thousand hues toned down harmoniously 
into each other by the summer haze, and " the eye was not filled 
with seeing," nor the spirit with the intoxicating sight of infi- 
nitely various life and form in perfectest repose. 
I was the first to break the silence. 
" Claude, well-beloved, will you not sketch a little ? " 
No answer. 

" Not even rhapsodize ? call it ' lovely, exquisite, grand, ma- 
jestic ? ' There are plenty of such words in worldings' mouths 
— not a young lady but would burst out with some enthusiastic 
commonplace at such a sight — surely one or other of them must 
be appropriate." 

" Silence, profane ! and take me away from this. Let us go 
down, and hide our stupidities among those sandhills, and so for- 
get the whole. What use standing here to be maddened by this 
tantalizing earth-spirit, who shows us such glorious things, and 
will not tell us what they mean ? " 

So down we went upon the " burrows " among the sands, 
which hid from us every object but their own chaotic curves and 
mounds. Above, a hundred skylarks made the air ring with 
carollings ; strange and gaudy plants flecked the waste round 
us, and myriads of the great spurge-moth, only found upon those 
burrows, whirred like humming-birds over our heads, or hung 
poised with their pink and grey wings outspread on the tall stalks 
of marram grass. All at once a cloud hid the sun, and a sum- 
mer whirlwind, presage of the thunder-storm, swept past us, 
carrying up with it a column of dry sand, and rattling the dry 
bents over our heads. 

" What a chill, doleful sigh comes from those reeds ! " said 
Claude. " I can conceive this desert, beneath a driving winter's 
sky instead of this burning azure, one of the most desolate places 
on the earth." 



248 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

" It inspired, once at least," I answered, " verses melancholy 
enough. The man who wrote them would not finish them ; for 
when the sadness was past, he thought it a sin, as I do, to turn 
on the 4 Werterian ' tap of malice prepense. But you shall 
have the verses, to cool you, as we lie roasting here, with a few 
wintry thoughts." 

Wearily stretches the sand to the surge, and the surge to the cloudland; 

Wearily onward I ride, watching the wild wave alone. 

Not as of old, like Homeric Achilles, kvSs'l yalcov, 

Joyous knight-errant of God, thirsting for labour and strife; 

No more on magical steed borne free through the regions of ether, 

But, like the poor hack I ride, selling my sinew for gold. 

Fruit-bearing autum is gone; let the sad quiet winter hang o'er me — 

What were the spring to a soul laden with sorrow and shame ? 

Green leaves would fret me with beauty ; my heart has no time to bepraise them; 

Gray rock, bough, surge, cloud — these wake no yearnings within, 

Sing not, thou skylark above ! even angels pass hushed by the weeper ! 

Scream on, ye sea-fowl ! my heart echoes your desolate cry. 

Sweep the dry sand on, thou sad wind, to drift o'er the shell and the sea-weed ; 

Sea-weed and shell, like my dreams, swept down the pitiless tide. 

Just is the wave which uptore us; 'tis Nature's own law which condemns us; 

Woe to the weak who, in pride, build on the faith of the sand! 

Joy to the oak of the mountain, he trusts to the might of the rock-clefts; 

Deeply he mines, and in peace feeds on the wealth of the stone. 

-Tr TV -TV TV -rf 

" Amen ! " answered Claude ; " and health and long life, in 
spite of all false quantities, to the exquisite old elegiac metre, 
like, as Coleridge says, — 

The rise of the fountain's silvery column, 

In the pentameter aye falling in melody back. 

But I hear a halloo from the shore ; there are our boatmen wait- 
ing for us." 

"Ay, desolate enough," I said, as we walked down beyond the 
tide-mark, over the vast fields of ribbed and splashy sands, 
" when the dead shells are rolling and crawling up the beach 
in wreaths before the gale, with a ghastly rattle as of the dry 
bones in the ' Valley of Vision,' and when not a flower shows on 
that sandcliff, which is now one broad bed of yellow, scarlet, and 
azure." 

" That is the first spot in England," said Claude, " except, of 
course, i the meads of golden king-cups,' where I have seen wild 
flowers give a tone to the colouring of the whole landscape, as 
they are said to do in the prairies of Texas. And look how 
flowers and cliff are both glowing in a warm green haze, like 
that of Cuyp's wonderful sandcliff picture in the Dulwich Gallery, 
wonderful, as I think, and true — let Mr. Ruskin revile it as 
much as he will." 



NORTH DEVON. 249 

" Strange, that you should have quoted that picture here ; its 
curious resemblance to this very place first awoke in me, years 
ago, a living interest in landscape-painting. But look there ; 
even in these grand summer days there is a sight before us sad 
enough. There are the ribs of some ill-fated ship, a man-of- 
war, too, as the story goes, standing like huge black fangs, half- 
buried in the sand. And off what are those two ravens rising, 
stirring up with their great obscene wings a sickly, putrescent 
odour ? A corpse ? " 

No, it was not a corpse ; but the token of many corpses. A 
fragment of some ship ; its gay green paint and half-effaced gild- 
ing contrasting mockingly with the long ugly feathered barnacle- 
shells, which clustered on it, rotting into slime beneath the sun, 
and torn and scattered by the greedy beaks of the ravens. 

" In what tropic tornado, or on what coral-key of the Bahamas, 
months ago, to judge by those barnacles, did that tall ship go 
down ? How long has this scrap of wreck gone wandering down 
the Gulf-stream, from Newfoundland to the Azores, from the 
Azores to Biscay, from Biscay hitherward on its homeless voyage 
past the Norwegian shore ? And who were all those living men 
who l went down to Hades, even many stalwart souls of heroes/ 
to give no sign until the sea shall render up her dead ? " 

" And every one of them," said Claude, " had a father, and 
mother ! — a wife, perhaps, and children, waiting for him ! — at 
least a whole human life, childhood, boyhood, manhood, in him ! 
All those years of toil and education, to get him so far on his 
life-voyage ; and here is the end thereof ! " 

" Say rather, the beginning thereof, Claude," we answered, 
stepping into the boat. " This wreck is but a torn scrap of the 
chrysalis-cocoon ; we may meet the butterflies themselves here- 
after." 

yfc yp yfc :fc tp 

" And now we are on board ; and alas ! some time before the 
breeze will be so. Take care of that huge boom landsman Claude, 
swaying and sweeping backwards and forwards across the deck, 
unless you wish to be knocked overboard. Take care, too, of 
that ]oose rope's end, unless you wish to have your eyes cut out. 
Take my advice, lie down here across the deck, as I am doing. 
Cover yourself with great coats, like an Irishman, to keep your- 
self cool, and let us meditate a little on this strange thing, and 
strange place, which holds us now. 

u Look at those spars, how they creak and groan with every 

heave of the long glassy swell. How those sails flap, and thunder, 

and rage, with useless outcries and struggles — -only because they 

are idle. Let the wind take them, and they will be steady, 

11* 



250 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

silent in an instant— their deafening, dissonant grumbling ex- 
changed for the soft victorious song of the breeze through the 
rigging, musical, self-contented, as of bird on bough. So it is 
through life, Claude ; there is no true rest but labour. ' No true 
misery,' as Carlyle says, ' but in that of not being able to work.' 
You may call it a pretty conceit. I call it a great world-wide 
law, which reaches from earth to heaven. Whatever the Preacher 
may have thought it in a moment of despondency, what is it but 
a blessing that ' sun, and wind, and rivers, and ocean,' as he says, 
and 'all things, are full of labour — man cannot utter it.' This 
sea which bears us would rot and poison, did it not sweep in and 
out here twice a-day in swift, refreshing current ; nay, more, in 
the very water which laps against our bows troops of glossy- 
limbed negro girls may have hunted the purblind shark in West 
Indian harbours, beneath glaring white-walled towns, with their 
rows of green jalousies, and cocoa-nuts, and shaddock groves. 
For on those white sands there to our left, year by year, are 
washed up foreign canes, cassia beans, and tropic seeds ; and 
sometimes, too, the tropic ocean snails, with their fragile shells 
of amethystine blue, come floating in mysteriously in fleets from 
the far west out of the passing Gulf-stream, where they have 
been sailing out their little life, never touching shore or ground, 
but buoyed each by his cluster of air-bubbles, pumped in at will 
under the skin of his tiny foot, by some cunning machinery of 
valves — small creatures truly, but very wonderful to men who 
have learned to reverence not merely the size of things, but 
the wisdom of their idea, — raising strange longings and dreams 
about that submarine ocean world which stretches, teeming with 
richer life than this terrestrial one, away, away there west- 
ward, down the path of the sun, toward the future centre of the 
world's destiny. 

" Wonderful ocean-world ! three fifths of our planet ! Can it 
be true that no rational beings are denizens there ? Science is 
severely silent — having as yet seen no mermaids — our captain 
there forward is not silent — if he has not seen them, plenty of his 
friends have. The young man here has been just telling me 
that it was only last month one followed a West Indiaman right 
across the Atlantic. ' For,' says he, ' there must be mermaids, 
and such-like. Do you think God would have made all that 
there water only for the herrings and mackerel ? ' " 

We do not know, Tom; but we, too, suspect not ; and we do 
know that honest men's guesses are sometimes found by science 
to have been prophecies, and that there is no smoke without fire, 
and few universal legends without their nucleus of fact. After 
all, those sea-ladies are too lovely a dream to part with in a 



NORTH DEVON. 251 

hurry, at the mere despotic fiat of stern old Dame Analysis, 
divine and reverend as she is. Why, like Keats's Lamia, 

Must all charms flee 
At the mere touch of cold Philosophy, 

who will not even condescend to be awe-struck at the new won- 
ders which she herself reveals daily ? Perhaps, too, according 
to the Duke of Wellington's great dictum, that each man must be 
the best judge in his own profession, — sailors may know best 
whether mermaids exist or not. Besides, was it not here on 
Croyde Sands, abreast of us, this very last summer, that a maiden 
— by which beautiful old word West-country people still call 
young girls — was followed up the shore by a mermaid who 
issued from the breakers, green-haired, golden-combed, and all ; 
and, fleeing home, took to her bed and died, poor thing ! of sheer 
terror in the course of a few days, persisting in her account of 
the monster ? True, the mermaid may have been an overgrown 
Lundy Island seal, carried out of his usual haunts by spring- 
tides and a school of fish. Be it so. Lundy and its seals are 
wonderful enough in all reason to thinking men, as it looms up 
there out of the Atlantic with its two great square headlands, not 
twenty miles from u.s, in the white summer haze. We will go 
there some day, Claude, and pick up a wild tale or two about it, 
which we will some day report also to the readers of Fraser, 
if time and space (" No gods," as Lange says, but very stubborn, 
unyielding brute Titans nevertheless) allow us. 

But, lo ! a black line creeps up the western horizon. Tom, 
gesticulating, swears that he sees " a billow break." True, there 
they come ; the great white horses, that " champ, and chafe, and 
toss in the spray." That long-becalmed trawler to seaward fills, 
and heels over, and begins to tug and leap, like an impatient 
horse, at the weight of her heavy trawl. Five minutes more, 
and the breeze will be down upon us. The young men whistle 
openly to woo it ; the old father thinks such a superstition some- 
what beneath both his years and his religion, but cannot help 
pursing up his lips into a sly " whe-eugh " when he has got well 

forward out of sight. 

# * # * 

Five long minutes ; there is a breath of air ; a soft, distant 
murmur ; the white horses curve their necks, and dive and van- 
ish, and rise again like snowy porpoises, nearer, and nearer, and 
nearer. Father and sons are struggling with that raving, riot- 
ous, drunken squaresail forward ; while we, according to our 
weakness, haul away upon the mains heet. 

When will it come ? It is dying back — sliding past us. " Hope 



252 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

deferred maketh the heart sick." No, louder and nearer swells 
" the voice of many waters," " the countless laugh of ocean," 
like the mirth of ten thousand girls, before us, behind us, round 
us ; and the oily swells darken into crisp velvet-green, till the 
air strikes us and heels us over, and leaping, plunging, thrash- 
ing our bows into the seas, we spring away close-hauled upon 
the ever-freshening breeze, and Claude is holding on by ropes 
and bulwarks, and I, whose "sea-legs" have not yet forgot 
their craft, am swinging like a pendulum as I pace the deck, 
enjoying, as the Norse vikings would have called it, " the gallop 
of the flying sea-horse, and the shiver of her tawny wings." 

Exquisite motion ! more maddening than the smooth floating 
stride of the race-horse, or the crash of the thorn-hedges before 
the stalwart hunter, or the swaying of the fir-boughs in the gale, 
when we used to climb as schoolboys after the lofty hawk's-nest ; 
but not so maddening as the new motion of our age — the rush of 
the express-train on the Great Western, when the live iron pants, 
and leaps, and roars, through the long chalk cutting, and white 
mounds gleam cold a moment against the sky and vanish ; and 
rocks, and grass, and bushes, fleet by in dim blended lines; and 
the long hedges revolve like the spokes of a gigantic wheel ; and 
far below, meadows, and streams, and homesteads, with all their 
lazy auld-warld life open for an instant, and then rush away ! 
and awe-struck, silent, choked with the mingled sense of pride 
and helplessness, we are swept on by that great pulse of Eng- 
land's life-blood, rushing down her iron veins ; and dimly out 
of the future looms the fulfilment of our primaeval mission, to 
conquer and subdue the earth, — and space, too, and time, 
and all things, — even, hardest of all tasks, yourselves, my cun- 
ning brothers ; ever learning some fresh lesson, except that 
hardest one of all, that it is the Spirit of God which giveth you 
understanding. 

" Yes, great railroads, and great railroad age, who would ex- 
change you, with all your sins, for any other time ? For swift 
as rushes matter, more swiftly rushes mind, — more swiftly still 
rushes the heavenly dawn up the eastern sky. ' The night is far 
spent, the day is at hand.' ' Blessed is that servant whom his 
Lord, when he cometh, shall find watching ! ' " 

" But come, my poor Claude, I see you are too sick for such 
deep subjects, so let us while away the time by picking the 
brains of this tall, handsome boy at the helm, who is humming a 
love-song to himself sotto voce, lest it should be overheard by the 
gray-headed father, who is forward, poring over his Wesleyan 
hymn-book. He will have something to tell you ; he has a soul 
in him looking out of those wild dark eyes, and delicate aquiline 



NORTH DEVON. 253 

features of his. He is no spade-drudge or bullet-headed Saxon 
clod ; he has in his veins the blood of Danish rovers and pas- 
sionate southern Milesians, who came hither from Teffrobani, 
the Isle of Summer, as the old Fenic myths inform us. Come 
and chat with him. You dare not stir ? Well, perhaps you 
are in the right. I shall go and fraternize, and bring you re- 

"Well, he has been, at all events, 'up the Straits ,' as the 
Mediterranean voyage is called here, and seen ' Palermy ' and 
the Sicilians. But for his imagination, I confess that what seems 
to have struck it most was that it was a fine place for Jack, for 
a man could get mools there for a matter of three half pence 
a-day." 

" And was that all you got out of him ? " asked Claude, sickly 
and sulkily. 

" Oh, you must not forget the halo of glory and excitement 
which in a sailor's eyes surrounds the delights of horseback ! 
But he gave me besides a long glowing account of the catechism 
which they had there, three quarters of a mile long." 

" Pope Pius's Catechism, I suppose ? " 

" So thought I, at first ; but it appeared that all the dead of 
the city were arranged therein, dried and dressed out in their 
finest clothes, ' every sect and age,' as Tom said, ' by itself, as 
natural as life ; ' whence I opine that he means some catacombs 
or other." 

Poor Claude could not even get up a laugh ; but his sorrows 
were coming swiftly to an end. The rock clefts grew sharper 
and sharper before us. The soft masses of the huge bank of 
wooded cliff rose higher and higher. The white houses of 
Clovelly, piled stair above stair up the rocks, gleamed more 
and more brightly out of the green round bosoms of the forest, 
as we shut in headland after headland ; and one tall conical rock 
after another darkened with its black pyramid the bright orb of 
the setting sun. Soon we began to hear the soft murmur of the 
snowy surf line, then the merry voices of the children along the 
shore ; and running straight for the cliff-foot beneath a towering 
wall of mountain we slipped into the little pier, from whence the 
red-sailed herring-boats were swarming forth like bees out of a 
hive, full of gay handsome faces, and all the busy blue-jacketed 
life of seaport towns, to their night's fishing in the bay. 

II. CLOVELLY. 
A couple of days had passed, and I was crawling up the 
paved stairs inaccessible to cart or carriage, which are flatteringly 
denominated " Clovelly Street," a landing-net full of shells in one 



254 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

hand, and a couple of mackerel lines in the other ; behind me a 
sheer descent, roof below roof, at an angle of 75°, to the pier 
and bay, 200 feet below, and in front of me, another hundred 
feet above, a green amphitheatre of oak, and ash, and larch, 
shutting out all but a narrow slip of sky, across which the low, 
soft, formless mist, was crawling, opening every instant to show 
some gap of intense dark rainy blue, and send down a hot vapor- 
ous gleam of sunshine upon the white cottages, with their gray 
steaming roofs, and bright green railings, packed one above 
another upon the ledges of the cliff; and on the tall tree-fuchsias 
and gaudy dahlias in the little scraps of court-yard, calling the 
rich faint odour out of the verbenas and jessamines, and, alas ! 
out of the herring-heads and tails, also, as they lay in the rivulet ; 
and lighting up the wings of the gorgeous butterflies, almost 
unknown in our colder eastern climate, which fluttered from 
woodland down to garden, and from garden up to woodland, and 
seemed to form the connecting link between that swarming hive 
of human industry and the deep wild woods in which it was 
embosomed. So up I was crawling, to dine off gurnards of my 
own catching, — excellent fish, despised by deluded Cockneys, 
who fancy that because its head is large and prickly, therefore 
its flesh is not as firm, and sweet, and white, as that of any cod 
who ever gobbled shell-fish, — when down the stair front of me, 
greasy as ice from the daily shower, came, slipping and stagger- 
ing, my friend Claude, armed with camp-stool and portfolio. 

"Where have you been wandering to-day?" I asked. "Have 
you yet been as far as the park, which, as 1 told you, would sup- 
ply such endless subjects for your pencil ? " 

" Not I. I have been roaming up and down this same ' New 
Road ' above us, and find there materials for a good week's more 
work, if I could afford it. Indeed, it was only to-day, for the 
first time, that I got as far as the lodge at the end of it, and then 
was glad enough to turn back, shuddering at the first glimpse of 
the fiat, dreary moorland beyond, — as Adam may have turned 
back into Eden after a peep out of the gates of Paradise." 

u You should have taken courage, and gone a half-mile fur- 
ther, — to the furze-grown ruins of a great Roman camp, which 
gives its name to the place, ' Clovelly,' — Vallum Clausum, or 
Vallis Clausa, as antiquarians derive it; perhaps, 'the hidden 
camp,' or glen, — perhaps something else. Who cares ? The 
old Romans were there, at least, ten thousand strong ; and some 
sentimental tribune or other of them had taste enough to perch 
his summer-house out on a cofnical point of the Hartland Cliffs, 
now tumbling into the sea, tessellated pavement, baths, and all. 
And strange work, I doubt not, went on iu that lonely nook, 



NORTH DEVON. 255 

looking out over the Atlantic swell, — nights and days fit for 
Petronius's own pen, among a seraglio of dark Celtic beauties. 
It has been — perhaps it was well that it should be ; and even in 
it there was a use and meaning, doubt not, else why was it per- 
mitted ? But they are past like a dream, those ten thousand 
stalwart men, who looked far and wide over the Damnonian 
moors from a station which would be, even in these days, a first- 
rate military position. Gone, too, are the old Saxon Franklins 
who succeeded. Old Wrengils, or some such name, whoever he 
was, at last found some one's bill too hard for his brainpan ; and 
there he lies on the hill above, in his ' barrow ' of Wrinklebury. 
And gone, too, the gay Norman squire, who, as tradition says, 
kept his fair lady in the old watchtower, on the highest point of 
the White Cliff, — ' Gallantry Bower,' as they call it to this day, 
now a mere ring of turf-covered stones, and a few low stunted 
oaks, shorn by the Atlantic blasts into the shape of two huge 
cannon, which form a favourite landmark for the fishermen of 
the bay. Gone they all are, Cymry and Roman, Saxon and 
Norman ; and upon the ruins of their accumulated labour we 
stand here. Each of them had his use, — planted a few more 
trees or cleared a few more, tilled a fresh scrap of down, organ- 
ized a scrap more of chaos. Who dare wish the tide of improve- 
ment, which has been flowing for nineteen centuries, swifter and 
swifter still as it goes on, to stop, just because it is not convenient 
to us just now to move on ? It will not take another nineteen 
hundred years, be sure, to make even this lovely nook as superior 
to what it is now, as it is now to the little knot of fishing-huts 
where naked Britons peeped out, trembling, at the iron tramp of 
each insolent legionary from the camp above. It will not take 
another nineteen hundred years to develop the capabilities of 
this place, — to make it the finest fishery in England next to 
Torbay, — the only safe harbour of refuge for West Indiamen, 
along sixty miles of ruthless coast, and a commercial centre for 
a vast tract of half-tilled land within, which only requires means 
of conveyance to be as fertile and valuable as nine-tenths of 
England. You ought to have seen that deer-park, Claude. The 
panorama from that old ruined ' bower ' of cliff and woodland, 
down and sea, is really unique in its way." 

" So is the whole place, in my eyes. I have seen nothing in 
England to be compared with this little strip of semi-tropic para- 
dise between two great waste worlds of sea and moor. Lyn- 
mouth might be matched among the mountains of Wales and 
Ireland. The first three miles of the Rheidol, from the Devil's 
Bridge towards Aberystwith, or the gorge of the Wye, down the 
opposite watershed of the same mountains, from Castle Dufferin 



256 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

down to Rhaiadyr, are equal to it in magnificence of form and 
colour, and superior in size. But I question whether any thing 
ever charmed me more than did the return to the sounds of 
nature which greeted me to-day, as I turned back from the 
dreary, silent moorland turnpike, into this magnificent new road, 
terraced along the cliffs and woods (those who first thought of 
cutting it must have had souls in them above the herd,) and 
listened to a glorious concert in four parts, blending and support- 
ing each other in the most exquisite harmony, from the shrill 
treble of a thousand birds, and the soft melancholy alto of the 
moaning woods, downward through the rich tenor hum of innu- 
merable insects, that hung like sparks of fire beneath the glades 
of oak, to the base of the unseen surge below, 

Whose deep and dreadful organ-pipe 

far below me contrasted strangely with the rich soft inland char- 
acter of the deep woods, luxuriant ferns, and gaudy flowers. It 
is that very contrast which makes the place so unique. One is 
accustomed to connect with the notion of the sea, bare cliffs, 
breezy downs, stunted shrubs struggling for existence ; and 
instead of them behold a forest-wall iive hundred feet high, of 
almost semi-tropic luxuriance. At one turn, a deep glen, with 
its sea of green woods, filled up at the mouth with the bright 
azure sheet of ocean. — Then some long stretch of the road would 
be banked up on one side with crumbling rocks, festooned with 
heath, and golden hawkweed, and London pride, like velvet 
cushions covered with pink lace, and beds of white bramble blos- 
som alive with butterflies ; while above my head, and on my 
right, the delicate cool canopy of oak and birch leaves shrouded 
me so close, that I could have fancied myself miles inland, buried 
in some glen unknown to any wind of heaven, but that every- 
where, between green sprays and gray stems, gleamed that same 
boundless ocean blue, seeming from the height at which I was, to 
mount into the very sky. It looked but a step out of the leafy 
covert into blank infinity. And then, as the road wound round 
some point, one's eye could fall down, down, through the abyss 
of perpendicular wood, tree below tree clinging to and clothing 
the cliff, or rather no cliff, but perpendicular sheet of deep wood 
sedge, and enormous crown ferns, spreading their circular fans. — 
But there is no describing them, or painting them either. — And 
then to see how the midday sunbeams leapt past one down the 
abyss, throwing out here a gray stem by one point of burnished 
silver, there a hazel branch by a single leaf of glowing golden 
green, shooting long bright arrows down, down, through the dim, 
hot, hazy atmosphere of the wood, that steamed up like a vapour- 



NORTH DEVON. 257 

bath, till it rested at last upon the dappled beach of pink and 
gray pebbles, and the dappled surge which wandered up and 
down among them, and broke up into richer intricacy, with its 
chequer- work of woodland shadows, the restless net of snowy 
foam." 

" You must be fresh from reading Mr. Buskin's book, Claude, 
to be able to give birth to such a piece of complex magniloquence 
as that last period of yours." 

" Why, I saw all that, and ten thousand things more ; and yet 
do you complain of me for having tried to put one out of all 
those thousand things into words ? And what do you mean by 
sneering at Mr. Ruskin ? Are there not in his books more and 
finer passages of descriptive poetry — word-painting — call them 
what you will, than in any other prose book in the English lan- 
guage ? " 

" Not a doubt of it, my dear Claude ; but it will not do for ( 
every one to try Mr. Ru skin's tools. Neither you nor I possess 
that almost Roman severity, that stern precision of conception 
and expression, which enables him to revel in the most gorgeous 
language, without ever letting it pall upon the reader's taste by 
affectation or over-lusciousness. His style is like the very hills 
along which you have been travelling, whose woods enrich, with- 
out enervating, the grand simplicity of their forms." 

" The comparison is just," said Claude. " Mr. Ruskin's style, 
like those very hills, and like, too, the glorious Norman cathe- 
drals of which he is so fond, is rather magnified than concealed 
by the innumerable multiplicity of its ornamental chasing and 
colouring." 

" And is not that," I asked, " the very highest achievement of 
artistic style ? " 

tt Doubtless. The severe and grand simplicity, of which folks 
talk so much, is great indeed, but only the greatest as long as 
men are still ignorant of Nature's art of draping her forms with 
colour, chiaroscuro, ornament, not at the expense of the original 
design, but in order to perfect it by making it appeal to every 
faculty, instead of those of form and size alone." 

" Still you will allow the beauty of a bare rock, a down, a 
church spire, a sheet or line of horizontal water, — their necessity 
to the completion of a landscape. I recollect well having the 
value of a stern straight line in Nature brought home to me, 
when, during a long ride in the New Forest, after my eye had 
become quite dulled and wearied with the monotonous softness of 
rolling lawns, feathery heath, and rounded oak and beech woods, 
I suddenly caught sight of the sharp peaked roof of Rhinefield 
Lodge, and its row of tall stiff poplar-spires, cutting the endless 



258 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

sea of curves. The relief to the eye was delicious. I really 
believe it heightened the pleasure with which I reined in my 
mare for a chat with old Toomer the keeper, and the glorious 
bloodhound who eyed me from between his master's legs." 

" I can well believe it. Simple lines in a landscape are of the 
same value as the naked parts of a richly-clothed figure. They 
act both as contrasts, and as indications of the original substratum 
of the figure ; but to say that severe simplicity is the highest 
ideal is mere pedantry and Manicheism." 

u Oh, every thing is Manicheism with you, Claude ! " 

" And no wonder, while the world is as full of it now as it 
was in the thirteenth century. But let that pass. This craving 
after so-called classic art, whether it be Manicheism or not, is 
certainly a fighting against God, — -a contempt of every thing 
which he has taught us artists since the introduction of Chris- 
tianity. I abominate this setting up of Sculpture above Paint- 
ing, of the Greeks above the Italians, — as if all Eastern civiliza- 
tion, all Christian truth, had taught Art nothing, — as if there 
was not more real beauty in a French cathedral or a Venetian 
palazzo than in a dozen Parthenons, and more soul in one 
Rafaelle, or Titian either, than in all the Greek statutes of the 
Tribune or Vatican." 

" You have changed your creed, I see, and, like all converts, 
are somewhat fierce and fanatical. You used to believe in 
Zeuxis and Parrhasius in old times." 

" Yes, as long as I believed in Fuseli's Lectures ; but when I 
saw at Pompeii the ancient paintings which still remain to us, 
my faith in their powers received its first shock ; and when I 
re-read in the Lectures of Fuseli and his school all their extrav- 
agant praises of the Greek painters, and separated their few 
facts fairly out from among the floods of rant on which they 
floated, I came to the conclusion that the ancients knew as little 
of colour or chiaroscuro as they did of perspective, and as little 
of spiritual expression as they did of landscape-painting. What 
do I care for the birds pecking at Zeuxis's grapes, or Zeuxis 
himself trying to draw back Parrhasius's curtain ? Imitative art 
is the lowest trickery. There are twenty men in England now 
capable of the same sleight of hand ; and yet these are recorded 
as the very highest triumphs of ancient art by the only men who 
have handed down to us any record of it." 

" Well, when you have said your say, and eaten your lunch- 
eon, let us start forth again together, and see the coast-line to the 
westward, which you will find strangely different, though quite 
as charming in its way as the scenery with which you have been 
already so enraptured." 



NORTH DEVON, 259 

PART III. 

CLOVELLY. 

Where were we at the end of our last number ? Preparing 
to start for the coast to the westward of Clovelly. Exactly ; so 
here recommences my story. Claude and I went forth along the 
cliffs of a park, which though not of the largest, is certainly of 
the loveliest, in England, — perhaps unique, from that abrupt con- 
tact of the richest inland scenery with the open sea, which is its 
distinctive feature. As we wandered along the edge of the cliff, 
beneath us on our left lay wooded valleys, lawns spotted with 
deer, huge timber trees, oak and beech, birch and alder, growing 
as full and round-headed as if they had been buried in some 
Shropshire valley fifty miles inland, instead of having the At- 
lantic breezes all the winter long sweeping past a few hundred 
feet above their still seclusion. Glens of forest wound away 
into the high inner land, with silver burns sparkling here and 
there under their deep shadows ; while from the lawns beneath 
the ground sloped rapidly upwards towards us, to stop short in a 
sheer wall of cliff, over which the deer were leaning to crop the 
shoots of ivy, where the slipping- of a stone would have sent 
them 400 feet perpendicular into the sea. On our right, from 
our very feet, the sea spread out to the horizon ; a single falcon 
was wheeling about the ledges below ; a single cormorant was 
fishing in the breakers, diving and rising again like some tiny 
water-beetle ; 

The murmuring surge 

That on the unnumbered pebbles idly chafed 

Could not be heard so high. 

The only sound besides the rustle of the fern before the 
startled deer was the soft mysterious treble of the wind as it 
swept over the face of the cliff beneath us ; but the cool air was 
confined to the hill-tops round ; beneath, from within a short 
distance of the shore, the sea was shrouded in soft summer haze. 
The far Atlantic lay like an ocean of white wool, out of which 
the Hartland Cliffs and the highest point of Lundy just showed 
their black peaks. Here and there the western sun caught one 
white bank of mist after another, and tinged them with glowing 
gold ; while nearer us long silvery zigzag tide-lines, which I 
could have fancied the tracks of water-fairies, wandered away 
under the smoky gray-brown shadows of the fog, and seemed to 
vanish hundreds of miles off into an infinite void of space, so 
completely was all notion of size or distance destroyed by the 
soft gradations of the mist. Suddenly, as we stood watching, a 



260 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

breeze from the eastward dived into the basin of the bay, swept 
the clouds out, packed them together, rolled them over each other, 
and hurled them into the air miles high in one vast Cordillera of 
snow mountains, sailing slowly out into the Atlantic ; and instead 
of the chaos of mist, the whole amphitheatre of cliffs, with their 
gay green woods, and spots of bright red marl and cold black 
iron-stone, and the gleaming white sands of Braunton, and the 
hills of Exmoor bathed in sunshine — so near and clear we almost 
fancied we could see the pink heather-hue upon them ; and the 
bay one vast rainbow, ten miles of flame-colour and purple, 
emerald and ultra-marine, flecked with a thousand spots of flying 
snow. You may believe or not, readers of Fraser, but we saw 
it then, not for the first time, or the last, please God. No one 
knows what gigantic effects of colours even our temperate zone 
can show till they have been in Devonshire and Cornwall ; and 
last, but not least, Ireland — the Emerald Isle, in truth. No stay- 
at-home knows the colour of the sea till he has seen the West- 
of England ; and no one, either stay-at-home or traveller, I sus- 
pect, knows what the colour of a green field can be till he has 
seen it among; the magic smiles and tears of an Irish summer 
shower in county Down. 

Down we wandered from our height through " trim walks and 
alleys green," where the arbutus and gum-cistus fringed the cliffs, 
and through the deep glades of the park, towards the delicious 
little cove which bounds it. — A deep crack in the wooded hills, 
an old mill half-buried in rocks and flowers, a stream tinkling on 
from one rock-basin to another towards the beach, a sandy lawn 
gay with sea-side flowers over which wild boys and bare-footed 
girls were trotting their poneys with panniers full of sand, and 
as they rattled back to the beach for a fresh load, standing up- 
right on the backs of their steeds, with one foot in each pannier, 
at full trot over rocks and stones where a landsman would find 
it difficult to walk on his own legs. 

Enraptured with the place and people, Claude pulled out his 
sketch-book and sat down. 

" What extraordinary rocks ! " said he at length. " How dif- 
ferent from those Cyclopean blocks and walls along the Exmoor 
cliffs are these rich brown purple and olive iron-stone layers, 
with their sharp serrated lines and polished slabs, set up on edge, 
snapped, bent double, twisted into serpentine curves, every sheet 
of cliff scored with sharp parallel lines at some fresh fantastic 
angle ! " 

" Yes, Claude, there must have been strange work here when 
all these strata were being pressed and squeezed together like a 
ream of wet paper between the rival granite pincers of Dart- 



NORTH DEVON. 261 

moor and Lundy. They must have suffered enough then in a 
few hours to give them a fair right to lie quiet till Doomsday, as 
they seem likely to do. But I can assure you that it is only old 
Mother Earth who has fallen asleep hereabouts. Air and sea 
are just as live as ever. Aye, lovely and calm enough spreads 
beneath us now the broad semicircle of the bay ; but to know 
what it can be, you should have seen it as I have done, when, in 
the roaring December morning, I have been galloping along the 
cliffs, wreck-hunting. — One morning, I can remember now well, 
how we watched from the Hartland Cliffs a great barque, that 
came drifting and rolling in before the western gale, while we 
followed her up the coast, parsons and sportsmen, farmers and 
Preventive men, with the Manby's mortar lumbering behind us 
in a cart, through stone gaps and track-ways, from headland to 
headland. — The maddening excitement of expectation as she ran 
wildly towards the cliffs at our feet, and then sheered off again 
inexplicably — her foremast and bowsprit, I recollect, were gone 
short off by the deck ; a few wild rags of sail fluttered from her 
main and mizen. But with all straining of eyes and glasses, we 
could discern no sign of man on board. Well I recollect the 
mingled disappointment and admiration of the Preventive men, 
as a fresh set of salvors appeared in view, in the form of a boat's 
crew of Clovelly fishermen ; how we watched breathlessly the 
little black speck crawling and struggling up in the teeth of the 
gale, under the shelter of the land, till, when the ship had rounded 
a point into smooth water, she seized on her like some tiny spider 
on a huge unwieldy fly; and then how one still smaller black 
speck showed aloft on the mainyard, and another — and then the 
desperate efforts to get the topsail set — and how we saw it tear 
out of their hands again, and again, and again, and almost fan- 
cied we could hear the thunder of its flappings above the roar 
of the gale, and the mountains of surf which made the rocks 
ring beneath our feet — and how we stood silent, shuddering, ex- 
pecting every moment to see whirled into the sea from the plung- 
ing yards one of those same tiny black specks, in each one of 
which was a living human soul, with wild women praying for it 
at home ! And then how they tried to get her head round to 
the wind, and disappeared instantly in a cloud of white spray — 
and let her head fall back again — and jammed it round again, and 
disappeared again — and at last let her drive helplessly up the 
bay, while we kept pace with her along the cliffs ; and how at 
last, when she had been mastered and fairly taken in tow, and 
was within two miles of the pier, and all hearts were merry with 
the hopes of a prize which would make them rich, perhaps, for 
years to come — one third, I suppose, of the whole value of her 



262 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

cargo — how she broke loose from them at the last moment, and 
rushed frantically in upon those huge rocks below us, leaping 
great banks of slate at the blow of each breaker, tearing off 
masses of iron-stone which lie there to this day to tell the tale, 
till she drove up high and dry against the cliff, and lay, the huge 
brute, like an enormous stranded whale, grinding and crashing 
itself to pieces against the walls of its adamantine cage. And 
well I recollect the sad records of the log-book that w r as left on 
board the deserted ship ; how she had been water-logged for 
weeks and weeks, buoyed up by her timber cargo, the crew cling- 
ing in the tops, and crawling down, when they dared, for putrid 
biscuit-dust and drops of water, till the water was washed over- 
board and gone ; and then notice after notice,/' On this day such 
an one died," " On this day such an one was washed away." 
The log kept up to the last, even when there was only that to 
tell, by the stern, business-like merchant skipper, whoever he 
w 7 as ; and how at last, when there was neither food nor water, 
the strong man's heart seemed to have quailed, or, perhaps, risen, 
into a prayer, jotted down in the log, " The Lord have mercy on 
us ! " — and then a blank of several pages, and, scribbled with a 
famine-shaken hand, " Remember thy Creator in the days of thy 
youth ; " — and so the log and the ship were left to the rats, which 
covered the deck when our men boarded her. And well I re- 
member the last act of that tragedy ; for a ship has really, as 
sailors feel, a personality, almost a life and soul of her own ; and 
as long as her timbers hold together, all is not over. You can 
hardly call her a corpse, though the human beings who inhabited 
her, and were her soul, may have fled into the far eternities ; 
and so I felt that night, as I came down along the very woodland 
road on which we are now walking with the northwest wind 
hurling dead branches and showers of crisp oak-leaves about my 
head ; and suddenly, as I staggered out of the wood here, I came 
upon such a piece of chiaroscuro as would have baffled Correggio, 
or Rembrandt himself. Under that very wall was a long tent of 
sails and spars, filled with Preventive men, fishermen, Lloyd's 
underwriters, lying about in every variety of strange attitude and 
costume ; while candles stuck in bayonet-handles in the wall, 
poured out a wild glare over shaggy faces and glittering weapons, 
and piles of timber, and rusty iron cable that glowed red-hot in 
the light, and then streamed up the glen towards me through the 
salt misty air in long fans of light, sending fiery bars over the 
brown transparent oak foliage and the sad beds of withered 
autumn flowers, and glorifying the wild flakes of foam, as they 
rushed across the light-stream, into troops of tiny silver angels, 
that vanished into the night and hid themselves among the woods 



NORTH DEVON. 263 

from the fierce spirit of the storm. And then, just where the 
glare of the lights and watch-fires was most brilliant, there too 
the black shadows of the cliff had placed the point of intensest 
darkness, lightening gradually upwards right and left, between 
the two great jaws of the glen, into a chaos of gray mist, where 
the eye could discern no form of sea or cloud, but a perpetual 
shifting and quivering as if the whole atmosphere was writhing 
with agony in the clutches of the wind. 

" The ship was breaking up," and they sat by her like hope- 
less physicians by a deathbed-side, to watch the last struggle, — 
and ' the effects of the deceased.' I recollect our literally ivarp- 
ing ourselves down to the beach, holding on by rocks and posts. 
There was a saddened, awe-struck silence, even upon the gentle- 
man from Lloyd's with the pen behind his ear. A sudden turn 
of the clouds let in a wild gleam of moonshine upon the white 
leaping heads of the giant breakers, and on that tall pyramid of 
the Black-church Rock, which now stands in such calm grandeur 
gazing down on the smiling summer bay, with the white sand of 
Braunton and the red cliffs of Portledge shining through its two 
•vast arches ; and there, against that slab of rock on your right, 
still discoloured with her paint, lay the ship, rising slowly on 
every surge, to drop again with a piteous crash as the w T ave fell 
back from the cliff, and dragged the roaring pebbles back with it 
under the coming wall of foam. You have heard of ships at 
the last moment crying aloud like living things in agony ? I 
heard it then, as the stumps of her masts rocked and reeled in 
her, and every plank and joint strained and screamed with the 
dreadful tension. 

A horrible image, — a woman shrieking on the rack, rose up 
before me at those strange semi-human cries, and would not be 
put away — and I tried to turn, and yet my eyes were rivetted 
on the black mass, which seemed vainly to implore the help of 
man against the stern ministers of the Omnipotent. 

Still she seemed to linger in the death-struggle, and I turned 
at last away ; when, lo ! a wave, huger than all before it, rushed 
up the boulders towards us. — We had just time to save our- 
selves. — A dull, thunderous groan, as if a mountain had col- 
lapsed, rose above the roar of the tempest ; and we all turned 
with an instinctive knowledge of what had happened, just in time 
to see the huge mass melt away into the boiling white, and vanish 
for evermore. And then the very raving of the wind seemed 
hushed with awe ; the very breakers plunged more silently 
towards the shore, with something of a sullen compunction ; and 
as we stood and strained our eyes into the gloom, one black plank 
after another crawled up out of the darkness upon the head of 



264 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

the coming surge, and threw itself at our feet like the corpse of 
a drowning man, too spent to struggle more. 

There is another subject for a picture for you ; but your gayer 
fancy will prefer the scene just as you are sketching it now, as 
still and bright as if this coast had never seen the bay darkened 
with the gray columns of the waterspouts, stalking across the 
waves before the northern gale ; and the tiny herring-boats fleeing 
from their nets right for the breakers, hoping more mercy even 
from those iron walls of rock than from the pitiless howling wil- 
derness of spray behind them ; and that merry beach beside the 
town covered with shrieking women and old men casting them- 
selves on the pebbles in fruitless agonies of prayer, as corpse 
after corpse swept up at the feet of wife and child, till in one 
case alone a single dawn saw upwards of sixty widows and 
orphans weeping over those who had gone out the night before 
in the fulness of strength and courage. Hardly an old playmate 
of mine, Claude, but is drowned and gone : — 

Their graves are scattered far and wide 
By mount, by stream, and sea. 

One poor little fellow's face starts out of the depths of memory ♦ 
as fresh as ever, my especial pet and bird-nesting companion as 
a boy — a little delicate precocious large-brained child, that might 
have written books some day, if he had been a gentleman's son ; 
but when his father's ship was wrecked they found him left alone 
of all the crew, just as he had been lashed into the rigging by 
loving and dying hands, but cold and stiff, the little soul beaten 
out of him by the cruel waves before it had time to show what 
growth there might have been in it. We will talk no more of 
such things. It is thankless to be sad when all heaven and earth 
are keeping holiday under the smile of God. 

And now let us return. At four o'clock to-morrow morning, 
you know, we are to start for Lundy. 



LUNDY. 

It was four o'clock on an August morning. Our little party 
had made the sleeping streets ring with jests and greetings, as it 
collected on the pier. Some dozen young men and women, sons 
and daughters of the wealthier coasting captains and owners of 
fishing-smacks, chaperoned by our old landlord, whose delicate 
and gentlemanlike features and figure were strangely at variance 
with the history of his life, — daring smuggler, daring man-of-war 
sailor, and then most daring and successful of coast-guard men. 
After years of fighting and shipwreck and creeping for kegs of 
brandy ; after having seen, too, — sight not to be forgotten — the 



NORTH DEVON. 265 

Walcheren dykes and the Walcheren fever, through weary 
months of pestilence, — most bootless of all the chimerical jobs 
which ever disgraced ministerial ignorance, he had come back 
with a little fortune of prize-money to be a village oracle, loving 
and beloved, as gentle and courteous as if he had never " stato 
al inferno" and looked Death in the face. Heaven bless thee, 
shrewd loyal heart, a gentleman of God's making, not unrecog- 
nized either by many of men's making. The other chaperone 
was a lady of God's making too ; one who might have been a 
St. Theresa, had she been born there and then ; but as it was, 
had been fated to become only the Wesleyan abbess of the town, 
and, like Deborah, "a mother in Israel." With her tall slim 
queenly figure, massive forehead, wild glittering eyes, features 
beaming with tenderness and enthusiasm, and yet overcast with 
a peculiar expression of self-consciousness and restraint, well- 
known to those who have studied the physiognomies of " saints" 
she seemed to want only the dress of some monastic order to 
make her the ideal of a mediaeval abbess, watching with a half 
pitying, half complacent smile, the gambols of a group of in- 
nocent young worldlings. I saw Claude gazing at her full of ad- 
miration and surprise, which latter was certainly not decreased 
when, as soon as all had settled themselves comfortably on board, 
and the cutter was slipping quietly away under the magnificent 
deer-park cliffs, the Lady Abbess pulling out her Wesleyan 
hymn-book gave out the Morning Hymn, apparently as a matter 
of course. 

With hardly a demur one sweet voice after another arose ; 
then a man gained courage, and chimed in with a full harmo- 
nious bass ; then a rich sad alto made itself heard, as it wandered 
in and out between the voices of the men and women. And at 
last a wild mellow tenor, which we discovered after much search- 
ing to proceed from the most unlikely-looking lips of an old dry, 
weather-bleared, mummified chrysalis of a man, who stood aft, 
steering with his legs, and showing no sign of life except when 
he slowly and solemnly filled his nose with snuff. 

" What strange people have you brought me among ? " asked 
Claude. " I have been wondering ever since I came here at 
the splendid faces and figures of men, women, and children, 
which popped out upon me from every door in that human 
rabbit-burrow above. I have been in raptures at the grace- 
fulness, the courtesy, the intelligence of almost every one I meet ; 
and now, to crown all, every one among them seems to be a 
musician." 

" Really you are not far wrong, and you will find them as 
remarkable morally as they are physically and intellectually. 
12 



266 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

The simplicity and purity of the women here put one more in 
mind of the valleys of the Tyrol than of an English village." 

" And in proportion to their purity, I suppose/' said Claude, 
" is their freedom and affectionateness ? " 

" Exactly. It would do your " naturalist " heart good, Claude, 
to see a young fellow just landed from a foreign voyage rolling 
up the street which we have just descended, and availing himself 
of the immemorial right belonging to such cases of kissing and 
being kissed by every woman whom he meets, young and old. 
You will find yourself here among those who are too simple- 
minded, and too full of self-respect, to be either servile or 
uncourteous." 

" I have found out already that Liberty, Fraternity, and Equal- 
ity, in such company as this, are infinitely pleasanter as well as 
cheaper than the aristocratic seclusion of a cutter hired for our 
own behoof." 

" True ; and now you will not go home and, as most tourists 
do, say that you know a place, without knowing the people who 
live in it — as if the human inhabitants of a range of scenery 
were not among its integral and most important parts ? " 

"What? are Copley Fielding's South Down landscapes incom- 
plete without a half-starved seven shillings a- week labourer in 
the foreground?" 

" Honestly, are they not a text without a sermon ? a premise 
without a conclusion ? Is it not partly because the land is down, 
and not well-tilled arable, that the labourer is what he is ? And 
yet, perhaps, the very absence of human beings in his vast sheets 
of landscape, when one considers that they are scraps of great, 
overcrowded, scientific England in the nineteenth century, is in 
itself the bitterest of all satires. But, hush ! there is another 
hymn commencing — not to be the last by many." 

•Jfr 7& '3j£ •Jp' ^K $fc 

We had landed, and laughed and scrambled, eaten and drank, 
seen all the sights of Lundy, and heard all the traditions. Are 
they not written in Mr. Bam field's Ilfracombe guide ? What is 
Mr. Reynolds about that he does not write a fire-and-brimstone 
romance about them ? Moresco Castle ; or, the Pirate Knight of 
the Atlantic Wave. What a title ! Or he might try, The Seal 
Fiend ; or, the Nemesis of the Scuttled West Indiaman. If I 
had paper and lubiHcite enough — that delightful carelessness of 
any moral or purpose, except that of writing fine and turning 
pennies, which possesses our modern scribblers — I could tales 

unfold But neither pirate legends, nor tales of cheated 

insurance offices, nor wrecks and murders, will make my readers 
understand Lundy — what it is " considered in its idea," as 



NORTH DEVON. 267 

the new slang is. It may be defined as a lighthouse-bearing 
island. The whole three miles of granite table-land, seals, sea- 
birds, and human beings, are mere accidents and appendages — 
the pedestal and the ornaments of that great white tower in the 
centre, whose sleepless fiery eye blinks all night long over the 
night-mists of the Atlantic. If, as a wise man has said, the days 
will come when our degenerate posterity will fall down and wor- 
ship rusty locomotives and fossil electric-telegraphs, the relics of 
their ancestors' science, grown to them mythic and impossible, as 
the Easter-islanders bow before the colossal statues left by a 
nobler and extinct race, then surely there will be pilgrimages to 
Lundy, and prayers to that white granite tower, with its unglazed 
lantern and rusting machinery, to light itself up again and help 
poor human beings ! Really, my dear brothers, I am not joking 
— you seem in a very fair way nowadays of getting to that — 
Emersonian sentimental philosophy for the " enlightened " few, 
and fetish-worship for the masses. — That is what you will get to 
— unless you repent, and " get back your souls." 

yfc Tffc $fc ?fc t£ yfc 

We had shot along the cliffs a red-legged chough or two, and 
one of the real old black English rat, exterminated on the main- 
land by the gray Hanoverian new-comer, and weary with sight- 
seeing and scrambling, we sat down to smoke and meditate on a 
slab of granite, which hung three hundred feet in air above the 
western main. 

" This is even more strange and new to me," said Claude, at 
length, " than any thing I have yet seen in this lovely west. I 
now appreciate Ruskin's advice to all painters, to go and study 
the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, instead of lingering about 
the muddy seas and tame cliffs of the Channel and the German 
Ocean." 

" How clear and brilliant," said I, " everything shows through 
this Atlantic atmosphere. The intensity of colouring may vie 
with that of the shores of the Mediterranean. The very rain- 
iness of the climate, by condensing the moisture into an ever- 
changing phantasmagoria of clouds, leaves the clear air and 
sunshine when we do get a glimpse of them, all the more pure 
and transparent." 

" The distinctive feature of the scene is, in my eyes, the 
daring juxtaposition of large simple masses of positive colour. 
There are none of the misty enamelled tones of Lynmouth, or 
the luscious richness of Clovelly. The forms are so simple and 
severe, that they would be absolutely meagre, were it not for the 
gorgeous colouring with which nature has so lovingly made up 
for the absence of all softness, all picturesque outline. One does 



268 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

not regret or even feel the want of trees here, while the eye 
ranges down from that dappled cloudworld above, over that vast 
sheet of purple heather, those dells bedded with dark velvet 
green fern, of a depth and richness of hue which I never saw 
before — over these bright gray granite rocks, spangled with black 
glittering mica and golden lichens, to rest at last on that sea 
below, which streams past the island in a swift roaring torrent 
of tide." 

" Sea, Claude ? say, ocean. This is real Atlantic blue here 
beneath us. No more Severn mud, no more glass-green bay- 
water, but real ocean sapphire — black, deep, intense, Homeric 
purple, it spreads away — away, there before us, without a break 
or islet, to the shores of America. You are sitting on one of the 
last points of Europe, and therefore all things round you . are 
stern and strange with a barbaric pomp, such as befits the boun- 
dary of a world." 

" Ay, the very form of the cliffs shows them to be the break- 
waters of a continent. No more fantastic curves and bands of 
slate, such as harmonize so well with the fairy-land which we 
left this morning : the cliffs, with their horizontal rows of cubical 
blocks, seem built up by Cyclopean hands." 

" Yet how symbolic is the difference between them and that 
equally Cyclopic masonry of the Exmoor coast. There every 
fracture is fresh, sharp-edged crystalline ; the worn-out useless 
hills are dropping to pieces with their own weight. Here each 
cube is delicately rounded off at the edges, every crack worn out 
into a sinuous furrow, like the scars of an everlasting warfare 
with the winds and waves." t3 

" Does it not raise strange longings in you," said Claude, " to 
gaze out yonder over the infinite calm, and then to remember 
that beyond it lies America ! — the New World ! the future world/ 
The great Titan-baby, who will be teeming with its own Athens 
and Londons, with new Bacons and Shakspeares, Newtons and 
Goethes, when this old worn-out island will be — what ? Oh ! 
when I look out here, like a bird from its cage, a captive from 
his dungeon, and remember what lies behind me, to what I must 
return to-morrow — the over-peopled Babylon of misery and mis- 
rule, puffery and covetousness — and there before me great coun- 
tries untilled, uncivilized, unchristianized, crying aloud for man to 
come and be man indeed, and replenish the earth and subdue it. 
' Oh, that I had wings as a dove, then would I flee away and be 
at rest ! ' Here, lead me away ; my body is growing as dizzy as 
my mind. I feel coming over me that horrible longing of which 
I have heard, to leap out into empty space. How the blank air 
whispers, ' Be free ! ' How the broad sea smiles, and calls with 



NORTH DEVON. 269 

its ten thousand waves, < Be free ! ' — As I live, if you do not take 
me away, I shall throw myself over the cliff." 

I did take him away, for I knew the sensation and its danger 
well. It has nothing to do with physical giddiness. I am cliff- 
bred, and never was giddy for an instant in my life, and yet I 
have often felt myself impelled to leap from masts, and tree-tops, 
and cliffs, and nothing but the most violent effort of will could 
break the fascination. I am sure, by the by, that many a puz- 
zling suicide might be traced to this same emotion acting on a 
weak and morbid brain. 

We returned to the little landing-cove. The red-sailed cutter 
lay sleeping below us — floating " double, ship and shadow." 
Shoals of innumerable mackerel broke up, making acres of 
water foam and sparkle round their silvery sides, with a soft 
roar (call it " a bull " if you like, it is the only expression for 
that mysterious sound,) while among them the black head of a 
huge seal was slowly and silently appearing and vanishing, as 
he got his dinner in a quiet business-like way, among the un- 
happy wanderers. 

We put off in the boat, and just half way from the cutter 
Claude gave a start, and the women a scream, as the enormous 
brute quietly raised his head and shoulders out of the water ten 
yards off, with a fish kicking in his mouth, and the water running 
off his nose, to take a deliberate stare at us, after the fashion of 
seals, whose ruling passion is curiosity. The sound of a musical 
instrument, the sight of a man bathing — any thing, in short, 
which their small wits cannot explain at first sight, is enough to 
make Ihem forget all their cunning, and thrust their heads sui- 
cidally into any danger ; and even so it fared with the " black 
man," as the girls, in their first terror, declared him to be. My 
gun went off — of itself I should like to believe — but the whole 
cartridge disappeared into his sleek round visage, knocking the 
mackerel from between his teeth, and he turned over a seven- 
foot lump of lifeless blubber. 

" Wretch ! " cried Claude, as we lugged him into the boat, 
where he lay with his head and arms hanging helplessly over 
the bows, like a sea-sick alderman on board a Margate steamer. 
44 What excuse can you give for such a piece of wanton 
cruelty ? " 

44 1 assure you his skin and oil are very valuable." 

44 Hypocrite ! were you thinking of his skin and oil when you 
pulled the trigger ? or merely obeying the fleshy lust of destruc- 
tiveness — the puppet of two bumps on the back of your head ? " 

44 My dear Claude, man is the microcosm, and as the highest 
animal, the ideal type of the mammalia, he, like all true types, 



270 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

comprises in himself the attributes of all lower species. There- 
fore he must have a tiger-vein in him, my dear Claude, as well 
as a beaver-vein and a spider-vein, and no more shame to him. 
You are *a butterfly, I am a beast of prey; both may have their 
own work to do in this age just as they had in the old ones ; and 
if you do not like that explanation, all I can say is, I can sym- 
pathize with you and with myself too. Homo sum — nil humani 
a me alienum puto. Trim the boat, uncle, or the seal will swamp 
us, and, like Samson, slay more in his death than ever he slew 
in his life." 

We slipped on homeward. The cliff-wall of Lundy stood out 
blacker and blacker every moment against the gay western sky, 
greens, grays, and purples, dyeing together into one rich deep 
monotone, for which our narrow colour-vocabulary has no word 
< — and threw a long cold shadow toward us across the golden 
sea ; and suddenly above its dark ridge a wild wreath of low 
rack caught the rays of the setting sun, and flamed up like a 
volcano towards the dun and purple canopy of upper clouds. 
Before us the blue sea and the blue land-line were fading into 
mournful gray, on which one huge West Indiaman blazed out, 
orange and scarlet, her crowded canvas all a-flame from the 
truck to the water's edge. — A few moments and she, too, had 
vanished into the gray twilight, and a chill night-wind crisped 
the sea. It was a relief to hear the Evening Hymn rise rich 
and full from one voice, and then another, and another, till the 
men chimed in one by one, and the whole cutter, from stem to 
stern, breathed up its melody into the silent night. 

But the hymns soon flagged — there was more mirth on board 
than could vent itself in old Charles Wesley's words ; and one 
began to hum a song tune, and then another, with a side glance 
at the expression of the Lady Abbess's face,-till at last, when a 
fair wife took courage, and Durst out with full pipe into " The 
sea, the sea," the ice was fairly broken ; and among jests and 
laughter one merry harmless song after another rang out, many 
of them, to Claude's surprise, fashionable London ones, which 
sounded strangely enough out there on the wild western sea. At 
last, — 

" Claude, friend," I whispered, " you must sing your share 
too — and mine also, for that matter." 

"What shall I sing?" 

" Any thing you will, from the sublime to the ridiculous. They 
will understand and appreciate it as well as yourself. Recollect, 
you are not among bullet-headed South Saxon clods, but among 
wits as keen and imaginations as rich as those of any Scotch 
shepherd or Manchester operative." 



XORTH DEVON. 271 

" Well, then, I will feel my way with a little i healthy animal- 
ism,' as Goethe would have said." 
And up rose his exquisite tenor : — 

There sits a bird on every tree, 

With a heigh-ho ! 
There sits a bird on eveiy tree, 
Sings to its love, as I to thee, 

With a heigh-ho, and a heigh-ho ! 
Young maids must marry. 

There grows a flower on every bough, 

With a heigh-ho ! 
There grows a flower on every bough ; 
Its gay leaves kiss — I'll show you how — 

With a heigh-ho, and a heigh-ho ! 
Young maids must marry. 

The sun's a bridegroom, earth a bride; 

With a heigh-ho ! 
The sun's a bridegroom, earth a bride; 
They court from morn to eventide : 
The earth shall pass but love abide. 

With a heigh-ho, and a heigh-ho ! 
Young maids must marry. 

The song was received rapturously by the women, wives and 
maids both. The abbess herself only objected, as in duty bound, 
by a faint half pitying " Tut — tut — tut ! " and then quoted medita- 
tively and half aside a certain text about " charity abiding for 
ever," which, to do Claude justice, he believed quite as firmly as 
the good Wesleyan matron, but perhaps in a somewhat larger 
and more philosophic sense. 

This was his first song, but it was not allowed to be his last. 
German ballads, Italian Opera airs, were all just as warmly, and 
perhaps far more sincerely, appreciated, as they would have been 
by any London evening party ; and the singing went on, hour 
after hour, as we slipped slowly on upon the tide, till it grew 
late, and the sweet voices died away one by one, and the Lib- 
erty, Equality, and Fraternity, which had reigned so pleasantly 
throughout the day took a new form, as the women huddled 
together to sleep in each other's arms, and the men and ourselves 
clustered forwards ; and from every mouth fragrant incense 
steamed upwards into the air. " Man a cooking animal ? " my 
dear Doctor Johnson — pooh ! man is a smoking animal. There 
is his ergon, his " differential energy," as the Aristotelians say — 
his true distinction from the ourang-outang. Ponder it well. 

The men were leaning on the trawl capstan, while our old 
landlord, with half a dozen pipes within a foot of his face, 
droned out some long sea-yarn about Ostend, and muds, and 
snow-storms, and revenue cruisers going down stern foremost, 



272 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

kegs of brandy and French prisons, which we shall not repeat; 
for indeed the public has been surfeited with sea stories of late, 
from Captain Chamier's dull ones up to the genial wisdom of 
Peter Simple, and the gorgeous word-painting of Tom Cringle's 
Log. And now the subject is stale — the old war and the won- 
ders thereof have died away into the past, like the men who 
fought in it ; and Trafalgar and the Bellerophon are replaced by 
Manchester and Mary Barton. We have solved the old sea- 
going problems, pretty well — thanks to wise English-hearted 
Captain Marry at, now gone to his rest, just when his work was 
done ; and we must turn round and face a few land-going prob- 
lems not quite so easy of solution. So Claude and I thought as 
we leant over the sloop's bows, listening neither to the Ostend 
story forewards, nor to the forty-stanza ballad aft, which the 
old steersman was moaning on, careless of listeners, to keep 
himself awake at the helm. Forty stanzas or so we did count 
from curiosity. The first line of each of which ended infallibly 
with 

Says the commodo — ore. 

And the third with 

Says the female smuggler. 

And then gave up in despair ; and watched in a dreamy, tired, 
half-sad mood, the everlasting sparkle of the water as our bows 
threw it gently off in sheets of flame and " tender curving lines 
of creamy " fire, that ran along the glassy surface, and seemed 
to awaken the sea for yards round into glittering life, as countless 
diamonds, and emeralds, and topazes, leaped and ran and dived 
round us, while we slipped slowly by — and then a speck of light 
would show far off in the blank darkness, and another, and 
another, and slide slowly up to us — shoals of medusae, every one 
of them a heaving globe of flame — and some unseen guillemot 
would give a startled squeak, or a shearwater close above our 
heads suddenly stopped the yarn, and raised a titter among the 
men, by announcing in most articulate English his intention of 
invading the domestic happiness of his neighbour — and then a 
fox's bark from the cliffs came wild and shrill, although so faint 
and distant ; or the lazy gaff gave a sad uneasy creak. — And 
then a soft, warm air, laden with heather honey, and fragrant 
odours of sedge, and birch, and oak, came sighing from the land. 
And all around us was the dense blank blackness of the night, 
except where now and then some lonely gleam through the 
southern clouds showed the huge cliff tops on our right. — It was 
almost unearthly, dream-like, a strange phantasmagoria, like 
some scenes from The Ancient Mariner — all the world shut out, 



NORTH DEVON. 273 

silent, invisible, and we floating along there alone, like a fairy 
ship creeking through Chaos and the unknown Limbo. Was it 
an evil thought that rose within us as we said to Claude, — 

" Is not this too like life ? Our only light the sparkles that 
rise up round us at every step, and die behind us; and all around, 
and all before, the great, black, unfathomable eternities ? A few 
souls brought together as it were by chance, for a short friendship 
and mutual dependence in this little ship of earth, so soon to 
land her passengers and break up the company for ever ? " 

He laughed. 

" There is a devil's meaning to everything in nature, and a 
God's meaning, too. Your friends, the zoologists, have surely 
taught you better than that. As I read Nature's parable to- 
night, I find nothing in it but hope. What if there be darkness, 
the sun will rise to-morrow. What if there seem a chaos, the 
great organic world is still living, and growing, and feeding, 
unseen by us, all the black night through ; and every phosphoric 
atom there below is a sign that even in the darkest night there 
is still the power of light, ready to flash out, wherever and how- 
ever it is stirred. Does the age seem to you dark ? Do you, 
too, feel as I do at times, the awful sadness of that text, — " The 
time shall come when ye shall desire to see one of the days of 
the Lord and shall not see it ? " Then remember that 

The night is never so long 

But at last it ringeth for matin song. 

And even as it is around us here, so it is in the world of men ; 
the night is peopled not merely with phantoms, and wizards, and 
spirits of evil, but under its shadow all opinions, systems, social 
energies, are taking rest, and growing, and feeding, unknown to 
themselves, that they may awake into a new life, and intermarry, 
and beget children nobler than themselves, when " the day-spring 
from on high comes down." Even now, see ! the dawn is gilding 
the highest souls, as it is those Exmoor peaks afar ; and we are 
in the night, only because we crawl below. What if we be un- 
conscious of all the living energies which are fermenting round 
us now ? Have you not shown me in this last week every moor- 
land pool, every drop of the summer sea, alive with beautiful 
organizations, multiplying as fast as the thoughts of man ? Is 
not every leaf breathing still? every sap vein drinking still, 
though we may not see them ? " Even so is the kingdom of 
God, like seed sown on the ground, and men rise, and lie down 
and sleep, and it groweth up they know not how." Must I quote 
your own verse against you ? Must I appeal from Philip drunk 

12* 



274 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

to Philip sober ? Listen to what you said to me only last week, 
and be ashamed of yourself: — 

The day of the Lord is at hand, at hand ! 

Its storms roll up the sky ; 
A nation sleeps starving on heaps of gold; 
All dreamers toss and sigh; 
The night is darkest before the dawn — 
When the pain is sorest, the child is born — 
And the day of the Lord at hand. 

Gather you, gather you, angels of God, 

Freedom, and mercy, and truth. 
Come ! for the earth is grown coward and old, 
Come down and renew us her youth ! 
Wisdom, self-sacrifice, daring and love, 
Haste to the battle-field, stoop from, above. 
To the day of the Lord at hand. 

Gather you, gather you, hounds of hell, 

Famine, and plague, and war. 
Idleness, bigotry, cant, and misrule, 
Gather, and fall in the snare ! 
Hirelings and mammonites, pedants and knaves, 
Crawl to the battle-field, sneak to your graves, 
In the day of the Lord at hand. 

Who would sit down and sigh for a lost age of gold, 

While the Lord of all ages is here ? 
True hearts will leap up at the trumpet of God, 
And those who can suffer, can dare. 
Each old age of gold was an iron age too, 
And the meekest of saints may find stern work to do, 
In the day of the Lord at hand.' 

He ceased, and we both fell into a reverie. The yarn and 
the ballad were finished, and not a sound broke the silence, 
except the screaming of the sea fowl, which led my thoughts 
wandering back to nights long past, when we dragged the seine 
up to our chins in water through the short midsummer night, 
and scrambled and rolled over on the beach in boyish glee, after 
the skate and mullet, with those now gone ; and as I thought 
and thought, old voices seemed to call to me, old faces looked at 
me, of playmates, and those nearer than playmates, now sleeping 
in the deep, deep sea, amid far coral islands ; and old figures 
seemed to glide out of the mysterious dark along the still sea 
floor, as if the ocean were indeed giving up her dead. I shook 
myself, turned away, and tried to persuade myself that I was 
dreaming. Perhaps I had been doing so. At least, I remember 
very little more, till I was roused by the rattling of the chain- 
cable through the hawse-hole, opposite the pier-head. 

And now, gentle readers, farewell ; and farewell, Clovelly, 
and all the loving hearts it holds ; and farewell, too, the soft still 
summer weather. Claude and I are taking our last walk together 



NORTH DEVON. 275 

along the deer-park cliffs. Lundy is shrouded in the great gray- 
fan of dappled haze which streams up from the westward, dim- 
ming the sickly sun. " There is not a breath the blue wave to 
curl." Yet, lo ! round " Chapman's Head " creeps a huge bank 
of polished swell, and bursts in thunder on the cliffs. — -Another 
follows, and another. — The Atlantic gales are sending in their 
avant-couriers of ground-swell — six hours more, and the storm 
which has been sweeping over " the still-vexed Bermoothes," and 
bending the tall palms on West Indian isles, will be roaring 
through the oak-woods of Devon. The old black buck is calling 
his does with ominous croakings, and leading the way slowly into 
the deepest coverts of the glens. The stormy petrels, driven in 
from the Atlantic, are skimming like great black swallows over 
the bay beneath us. Long strings of sea-fowl are flagging on 
steadily at railroad pace, towards the sands and salt-marshes of 
Braunton. The herring-boats are hastily hauling their nets — 
you may see the fish sparkling like flakes of silver as they come 
up over the gunwale ; all craft, large and small, are making for 
the shelter of the pier. Claude starts this afternoon to sit for 
six months in Babylonic smoke, working up his sketches into 
certain unspeakable pictures, with which the world will be aston- 
ished, or otherwise, at the next Royal Academy Exhibition ; 
while I, for whom another fortnight of pure western air remains, 
am off to well-known streams, to be in time for the autumn 
floods, and the shoals of fresh-run salmon-trout. 



276 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES, 



PHAETHON; 



LOOSE THOUGHTS FOE LOOSE THINKERS. 

" Words are the fool's counters, but the wise man's money," 

"Trench. 

" Equidem, eollabente in vitium atque errorem loquendi usu, occasum ejus 
urbis remque humilem atque obsauram subsequi crediderim: verba enim 
partim inscita et putida, partim mendosa et perperam prolata, quid nisi ignavos 
et oscitantes et ad servile quidvisjam olim paratos incolarum animos haud 
levi indicio declarant? " — Milton. 

Templeton and I were lounging by the clear limestone 
stream which crossed his park, and wound away round wooded 
hills toward the distant Severn. A lovelier fishing morning 
sportsmen never saw. A soft grey under-roof of cloud slid on 
before a soft west wind, and here and there a stray gleam of 
sunlight shot into the vale across the purple mountain-tops, and 
awoke into busy life the denizens of the water, already quick- 
ened by the mysterious electric influences of the last night's 
thunder-shower. The long-winged cinnamon-flies spun and flut- 
tered over the pools ; the sand- bees hummed merrily round their 
burrows in the marly bank ; and delicate iridescent ephemerae 
rose by hundreds from the depths, and dropping their shells, 
floated away, each a tiny Venus Anadyomene, down the glassy 
ripples of the reaches. Every moment a heavy splash beneath 
some overhanging tuft of milfoil or water-hemlock proclaimed 
the death-doom of a hapless beetle who had dropped into the 
stream beneath ; yet still we fished and fished, and caught noth- 
ing, and seemed utterly careless about catching any thing ; till 
the old keeper who followed us, sighing and shrugging his 
shoulders, broke forth into open remonstrance : — 

" Excuse my liberty, gentlemen, but whatever is the matter 
with you and master, Sir ? I never did see you miss so many 
honest rises before." 

" It is too true," said Templeton to me with a laugh, " I must 



PHAETHON. 277 

confess, I have been dreaming instead of fishing the whole morn- 
ing. But what has happened to you, who are not as apt as I 
am to do nothing by trying to do two things at once ? " 

" My hand may well be somewhat unsteady ; for to tell the 
truth, I sat up all last night writing." 

"A hopeful preparation for a day's fishing in limestone water ! 
But what can have set you on writing all night, after so busy 
and talkative an evening as the last, ending too, as it did, some- 
where about half-past twelve ? " 

" Perhaps the said talkative evening itself ; and I suspect, if 
you will confess the truth, you will say that your morning's medi- 
tations are running very much in the same channel." 

" Lewis," said he, after a pause, " go up to the hall, and bring 
some luncheon for us down to the lower waterfall." 

"And a wheelbarrow to carry home the fish, Sir ? " 

" If you wish to warm yourself, certainly. And now, my 
good fellow," said he, as the old keeper toddled away up the 
park, " I will open my heart — a process for which I have but 
few opportunities here — to an old college friend. I am disturbed 
and saddened by last night's talk, and by last night's guest." 

" By the American professor ? How, in the name of English 
exclusiveness, did such a rampantly heterodox spiritual guerilla 
invade the respectabilities and conservatisms of Herefordshire ? " 

" He was returning from a tour through Wales, and had in- 
troductions to me from some Manchester friends of mine, to 
avail himself of which, I found, he had gone some thirty miles 
out of his way." 

" Complimentary to you, at least." 

"To Lady Jane, I suspect, rather than to me ; for he told .me 
broadly enough that all the flattering attentions which he had 
received in Manchester — where, you know, all such prophets 
are welcomed with open arms, their only credentials being that, 
whatsoever they believe, they shall not believe the Bible — had 
not given him the pleasure which he had received from that one 
introduction to what he called ' the inner hearth-life of the Eng- 
lish landed aristocracy.' But what did you think of him ? " 

" Do you really wish to know ? " 

"I do." 

" Then, honestly, I never heard so much magniloquent un- 
wisdom talked in the same space of time. It was the sense of 
shame for my race which kept me silent all the evening. I 
could not trust myself to argue with a gray-haired Saxon man, 
whose fifty years of life seemed to have left him a child, in all 
but the childlike heart which alone can enter into the kingdom 
of heaven." 



278 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

" You are severe," said Templeton, smilingly though, as if his 
estimate were not very different from mine. 

" Can one help being severe when one hears irreverence 
poured forth from reverend lips ? I do not mean merely irrev- 
erence for the Catholic Creeds ; that to my mind — God forgive 
me if I misjudge him — seemed to me only one fruit of a deep 
root of irreverence for all things as they are, even for all things 
as they seem. Did you not remark the audacious contempt for 
all ages but ' our glorious nineteenth century,' and the still deeper 
contempt for all in the said glorious time, who dared to believe 
that there was any ascertained truth independent of the private 
fancy and opinion of — for I am afraid it came to that — him, 
Professor Windrush, and his circle of elect souls ? i You may 
believe nothing, if you like, and welcome ; but if you do take to 
that unnecessary act, you are a fool if you believe anything but 
what I believe ; — though I do not choose to state what that 
is.' .... Is not that, now, a pretty fair formulization of his 
doctrine ? " 

" But, my dear raver," said Templeton, laughing, " the man 
believed at least in physical science. I am sure we heard enough 
about its triumphs." 

" It may be so. But to me his very ' spiritualism ' seemed 
more materialistic than his physics. His notion seemed to be, 
though Heaven forbid that I should say that he ever put it form- 
ally before himself " 

" Or anything else," said Templeton, sotto voce. 

" — that it is the spiritual world which is governed by physi- 
cal laws, and the physical by spiritual ones ; that while men and 
women are merely the puppets of cerebrations and mentations, 
and attractions and repulsions, it is the trees, and stones, and 
gases, who have the wills and the energies, and the faitjis and 
the virtues and the personalities." 

" You are caricaturing." 

" How so ? How can I judge otherwise, when I hear a man 
talking, as he did, of God in terms which, every one of them, 
involved what we call the essential properties of matter — space, 
time, passibility, motion ; setting forth phrenology and mesmer- 
ism as the great organs of education, even of the regeneration 
of mankind ; apologizing for the earlier ravings of the Pough- 
keepsie seer, and considering his later eclectico-pantheist far- 
ragos as great utterances : while, whenever he talked of nature 
he showed the most credulous craving after everything which 
we the countrymen of Bacon, have been taught to consider un- 
scientific — Homoeopathy, Electro-biology, Loves of the Plants 
a la Darwin, Vestiges of Creation, Vegetarianisms, Teetotalisms 



PHAETHON. 279 

— never mind what, provided it was unaccredited or condemned 
by regularly educated men of science ? " 

" But you don't mean to assert that there is nothing in any 
of these theories ? " 

"Of course not. I can no more prove a universal negative 
about them, than I can about the existence of life on the moon. 
But I do say that this contempt for that which has been already 
discovered — this carelessness about induction from the normal 
phenomena,^coupled with this hankering after theories built upon 
exceptional ones — this craving for ' signs and wonders,' which is 
the sure accompaniment of a dying faith in God, and in nature 
as God's work — are symptoms which make me tremble for the 
fate of physical as well as of spiritual science, both in America 
and in the Americanists here at home. As the Professor talked 
on, I could not help thinking of the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria, 
and their exactly similar course, — downward from a spiritualism 
of notions and emotions, which in every term confessed its own 
materialism, to the fearful discovery that consciousness does not 
reveal God, not even matter, but only its own existence ; and 
then onward, in desperate search after something external where- 
in to trust, toward theurgic fetish worship, and the secret virtues 
of gems and flowers and stars ; and, last of all, to the lowest 
depth of bowing statues and winking pictures. The sixth -cen- 
tury saw that career, Templeton : the nineteenth may see it re- 
enacted, with only these differences, that the nature-worship 
which seems coming will be all the more crushing and slavish, 
because we know so much better how vast and glorious nature 
is ; and that the superstitions will be more clumsy and foolish 
in proportion as our Saxon brain is less acute and discursive, 
and our education less severely scientific, than those of the old 
Greeks." 

" Silence, raver ! " cried Templeton, throwing himself on the 
grass in fits of laughter. " So the Professor's grandchildren will 
have either turned Papists, or be bowing down before rusty loco- 
motives and broken electric telegraphs ? But, my good friend, 
you surely do not take Professor Windrush for a fair sample of 
the great American people ? " 

" God forbid that so unpractical a talker should be a sample 
of the most practical people upon earth. The Americans have 
their engineers, their geographers, their astronomers, their scien- 
tific chemists ; few indeed, but such as bid fair to rival those of 
any nation upon earth. But these, like other true workers, hold 
their tongues and do their business." 

"And they have a few indigenous authors too : you must have 
read the Biglow Papers, and the Fable for Critics, — and last but 
not least, Uncle Tom's Cabin ? " 



280 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

" Yes ; and I have had far less fear for Americans since I read 
that book ; for it showed me that there was right healthy power, 
artistic as well as intellectual, among them even now, — ready, 
when their present borrowed peacock's feathers have fallen off, 
to come forth and prove that the Yankee Eagle is a right gallant 
bird, if he will but trust to his own natural plumage." 

"And they have a few statesmen also." 

" But they are curt, plain-spoken, practical, — in every thing 
antipodal to the knot of hapless men, who, unable from some de- 
fect or morbidity to help on the real movement of their nation, 
are fain to get their bread with tongue and pen, by retailing to 
' silly women/ ' ever learning and never coming to the knowledge 
of the truth,' second-hand German eclecticisms, now exploded 
even in the country where they arose, and the very froth and 
scum of the Medea's caldron, in which the disjecta membra of old 
Calvinism are pitiably seething." 

" Ah ! It has been always the plan, you know, in England, as 
well as in America, courteously to avoid taking up a German the- 
ory till the Germans had quite done with it, and thrown it away 
for something new. But w T hat are we to say of those who are 
trying to introduce into England these very Americanized Ger- 
manisms, as the only teaching which can suit the needs of the old 
world ? " 

" We will, if we are in a vulgar humour, apply to them a cer- 
tain old proverb about teaching one's grandmother a certain sim- 
ple operation on the egg of the domestic fowl ; but we will no 
less take shame to ourselves, as sons of Alma Mater, that such 
nonsense can get even a day's hearing, either among the daugh- 
ters of Manchester manufacturers, or among London working 
men. Had we taught them what we were taught in the schools, 
Templeton — " 

"Alas, my friend, we must ourselves have learnt it first. I 
have no right to throw stones at the poor Professor ; for I could 
not answer him." 

" Do not suppose that I can either. All I say is, — mankind 
has not lived in vain. Least of all has it lived in vain during 
the last eighteen hundred years. It has gained something of 
eternal truth in every age, and that which it has gained is as 
fresh and young now as ever ; and I will not throw away the 
bird in the hand, for any number of birds in the bush." 

" Especially when you suspect most of them to be only wooden 
pheasants, set up to delude poachers. Well, you are far more of 
a Philister and a Conservative than I thought you." 

" The New is coming, I doubt not ; but it must grow organi- 
cally out of the Old, — not root the old up, and stick itself full 



PHAETHON. 281 

grown into the place thereof, like a French tree of liberty, — sure 
of much the same fate. Other foundation can no man lay than 
that which is laid already, in spiritual things or in physical ; as 
the Professor and his school will surely find." 

" You recollect to whom the Bible applies that text ? " 

"I do." 

" And yet you say you cannot answer the Professor ? " 

" I do not care to do so. There are certain root-truths which 
I know, because they have been discovered and settled for ages ; 
and instead of accepting the challenge of every I-know-not-whom 
to reexamine them, and begin the world's work all over again, I 
will test his theories by them ; and if they fail to coincide, I will 
hear no more speech about the details of the branches and flow- 
ers, for I shall know the root is rotten." 

" But he, too, acknowledged certain of those root-truths," said 
Templeton, who seemed to have a lingering sympathy with my 
victim ; " he insisted most strongly, and spoke, you will not deny, 
eloquently and nobly on the Unity of the Deity." 

" On the non-Trinity of it, rather ; for I will not degrade the 
word ' Him,' by applying it here. But, tell me honestly — 
<?' est le timbre qui fait la musique — did his 'Unity of the Deity' 
sound in your English Bible-bred heart at all like that ancient, 
human, personal ' Hear, O Israel ! the Lord thy God is one 
Lord?' 5 " 

" Much more like ' The Something our Nothing is one Some- 
thing.' " 

" May we not suspect, then, that his notion of the ' Unity of 
the Deity' does not quite coincide with the foundation already 
laid, whosesoever else may ? " 

" You are assuming rather hastily." 

" Perhaps I may prove also, some day or other. Do you 
think, moreover, that the theory which he so boldly started, when 
his nerves and his manners were relieved from the unwonted 
pressure by Lady Jane and the ladies going up stairs, was part 
of the same old foundation ? " 

" Which, then ? " 

" That, if a man does but believe a thing, he has a right to 
speak it and act on it, right or wrong. Have you forgotten his 
vindication of your friend, the radical voter, and his ' spirit of 
truth?'" 

" What, the worthy who, when I canvassed him as the liberal 
candidate for .... , and promised to support complete free- 
dom of religious opinion, tested me by breaking out into such 
blasphemous ribaldry as made me run out of the house, and then 
went and voted against me as a bigot ? " 



282 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

"I mean him, of course. The Professor really seemed to 
admire the man, as a more brave and conscientious hero than 
himself. I am not sqeamish, as you know : but I am afraid that 
I was quite rude to him when he went as far as that" 

" What, — when you told him that you thought that, after all, 
the old theory of the Divine Right of Kings was as plausible as 
the new theory of the Divine Right of Blasphemy ? — My dear 
fellow, do not fret yourself on that point. He seemed to take it 
rather as a compliment to his own audacity, and whispered to 
me that ' The Divine Right of Blasphemy ' was an expression of 
which Theodore Parker himself need not have been ashamed." 

" He was pleased to be complimentary. But, tell me, what 
was it in his oratory which has so vexed the soul of the country 
squire ? " 

" That very argument of his, among many things. I saw, or 
rather felt, that he was wrong ; and yet, as I have said already, 
I could not answer him ; and, had he not been my guest, should 
have got thoroughly cross with him as a pis allerT 

" I saw it. But, my friend, used we not to read Plato together, 
and enjoy him together, in old Cambridge days ? Do you not 
think that Socrates might at all events have driven the Professor 
into a corner ? " 

" He might : but I cannot. Is that, then, what you were writ- 
ing about all last night ?" 

" It was. I could not help, when I went out on the terrace to 
smoke my last cigar, fancying to myself how Socrates might have 
seemed to set you, and the Professor, and that warm-hearted, 
right-headed, wrong-tongued High-Church Curate, all together 
by the ears, and made confusion worse confounded for the time 
being, and yet have left for each of you some hint whereby you 
might see the darling truth, for which you were barking, all the 
more clearly in the light of the one which you were howling 
down." 

" And so you sat up, and — I thought the corridor smelt some- 
what of smoke." 

« Forgive, and I will confess. I wrote a dialogue ; — and here 
it is, if you choose to hear it. If there are a few passages, or 
even many, which Plato would not have written, you will con- 
sider my age and inexperience, and forgive." 

" My dear fellow, you forgot that I, like you, have been ten 
years away from dear old Alma-Mater, Plato, the boats, and 
Potton Wood. My authorities now are Morton on Soils, and 
Miles on the Horse's Foot. Read on, fearless of my criticisms. 
Here is the waterfall ; we will settle ourselves on Jane's favourite 
seat. You shall discourse, and I, till Lewis brings the luncheon, 



PHAETHON. 283 

will smoke my cigar ; and if I seem to be looking at the moun- 
tain, don't fancy that I am only counting how many young grouse 
those heath-burning worthies will have left me by the twelfth." 
So we sat down, and I began : — 



PHAETHON. 



Alcibiades and I walked into the Pnyx early the other 
morning, before the people "assembled. There we saw Socrates 
standing, having his face turned toward the rising sun. Ap- 
proaching him, we perceived that he was praying ; and that so 
ardently, that we touched him on the shoulder before he became 
aware of our presence. 

" You seem like a man filled with the God, Socrates," said 
Alcibiades. 

" Would that were true," answered he, " both of me and of all 
who will counsel here this day. In fact, I was praying for that 
very thing ; namely, that they might have light to see the truth, 
in whatsoever matter might be discussed here." 

" And for me also ? " said Alcibiades ; — " but I have prepared 
my speech already." 

"And for you also, if you desire it, — even though some of your 
periods should be spoiled thereby. But why are you both here 
so early, before any business is stirring ? " 

" We were discussing," said I, " that very thing for which we 
found you praying, namely, truth, and what it might be." 

" Perhaps you went a worse way toward discovering it than I 
did. But let us hear. Whence did the discussion arise ? " 

"From something," said Alcibiades, "which Protagoras said 
in his lecture yesterday, — How truth was what each man trow- 
eth, or believeth to be true. ' So that,' he said, * one tiling is true 
to me, if I believe it true, and another opposite thing to you, if 
you believe that opposite. For,' continued he, ' there is an objec- 
tive and a subjective truth ; the former, doubtless, one and abso- 
lute, and contained in the nature of each thing ; -but the other 
manifold and relative, varying with the faculties of each perceiver 
thereof.' But as each man's faculties, he said, were different from 
his neighbour's, and all more or less imperfect, it was impossible 
that the absolute objective truth of any thing could be seen by 
any mortal, but only some partial approximation, and, as it were, 
sketch of it, according as the object was represented with more 
or less refraction on the mirror of his subjectivity. And there- 



284 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

fore, as the true inquirer deals only with the possible, and lets 
the impossible go, it was the business of the wise man, shunning 
the search after absolute truth as an impious attempt of the 
Titans to scale Olympus, to busy himself humbly and practically 
with subjective truth, and with those methods — rhetoric, for in- 
stance — by which he can make the subjective opinions of others 
either similar to his own, or, leaving them as they are, — for it 
may be very often unnecessary to change them, — useful to his 
own ends." 

Then Socrates, laughing, — 

" My fine fellow, you will have made more than one oration 
in the Pnyx to-day. And indeed, I myself felt quite exalted, 
and rapt aloft, like Bellerophon on Pegasus, upon the eloquence 
of Protagoras and you. But yet forgive me this one thing ; for 
my mother bare me, as you know, a man-midwife, after her own 
trade, and not a sage." 

Alcibiades. " What then ? " 

Socrates. "This, my astonishing friend — for really I am 
altogether astonished and struck dumb, as I always am whenso- 
ever I hear a brilliant talker like you discourse concerning objec- 
tivities and subjectivities, and such mysterious words : at such 
moments I am like an old war-horse, who, though he will rush 
on levelled lances, shudders and sweats with terror at a boy rat- 
tling pebbles in a bladder ; and I feel altogether dizzy, and dread 
lest I should suffer some such transformation as Scylla, when I 
hear awful words, like incantations, pronounced over me, of which 
I, being no sage, understand nothing. — But tell me now, Alcibia- 
des ; did the opinion of Protagoras altogether please you ? " 

A. " Why not ? Is it not certain that two equally honest men 
may differ in their opinions on the same matter ? " 

S. " Undeniable." 

A. " But if each is equally sincere in speaking what he be- 
lieves, is not each equally moved by the spirit of truth ? " 

S. " You seem to have been lately initiated, and that not at 
Eleusis merely, nor in the Cabiria, but rather in some Persian 
or Babylonian mysteries, when you discourse thus of spirits. But 
you, Phaeton," (turning to me,) " how did you like the periods 
of Protagoras ? " 

" Do not ask me, Socrates," said I, " for indeed we have fought 
a weary battle together ever since sundown last night ; and all 
that I had to say I learnt from you." 

S. " From me, my good fellow ? " 

Phaethon. " Yes, indeed. I seemed to have heard from 
you that truth is simply ' facts as they are.' But when I urged 
this on Alcibiades, his arguments seemed superior to mine." 



PHAETHON. 285 

A. " But I have been telling him, drunk and sober, that it is 
my opinion also as to what truth is. Only I, with Protagoras, 
distinguish between objective fact and subjective opinion." 

S. " Doing rightly, too, fair youth. But how comes it then 
that you and Phaeton cannot agree ? * 

" That," said I, " you know better than either of us." 

" You seem both of you," said Socrates, " to be, as usual, in 
the family way. Shall I exercise my profession on you." 

" No, by Zeus ! " answered Alcibiades, laughing ; " I fear thee, 
thou juggler, lest I suffer once again the same fate with the 
woman in the myth, and after I have conceived a fair man-child, 
and, as I fancy, brought it forth, thou hold up to the people some 
dead puppy, or log, or what not, and cry, ' Look what Alcibiades 
has produced ! ' " 

S. " But, beautiful youth, before I can do that, you will have 
spoken your oration on the bema, and all the people will be ready 
and able to say, ' Absurd ! nothing but what is fair can come 
from so fair a body/ Come, let us consider the question to- 
gether." 

I assented willingly ; and Alcibiades, mincing and pouting, 
after his fashion, still was loth to refuse. 

S. " Let us see, then. Alcibiades distinguishes, he says, be- 
tween objective fact and subjective opinion ? " 

A. " Of course I do." 

S. " But not, I presume, between objective truth and subjective 
truth, whereof Protagoras spoke ? " 

A. " What trap are you laying now ? I distinguish between 
them also, of course." 

S. "Tell me, then, dear youth, of your indulgence, what they 
are ; for I am shamefully ignorant on the matter." 

A. " Why, do they not call a thing objectively true, when it is 
true absolutely in itself; but subjectively true, when it is true in 
the belief of a particular person ? " 

S. " — Though not necessarily true objectively, that is, ab- 
solutely and in itself ? " 

A. " No." 

S. " But possibly true so ? " 

A. " Of course." 

S. " Now, tell me — a thing is objectively true, is it not, when 
it is a fact as it is ? " 

A. "Yes." 

S. u And when it is a fact as it is not, it is objectively false ; 
for such a fact would not be true absolutely, and in itself, would 
it?" 

A. " Of course not." 



286 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

S. " Such a fact would be, therefore, no fact, and nothing." 

A. "Why so?" 

S. " Because, if a thing exists, it can only exist as it is, not as 
it is not ; at least, my opinion inclines that way." 

" Certainly not," said I ; " why do you haggle so, Alcibiades ? " 

S. " Fair and softly, Phaethon ! How do you know that he is 
not fighting for wife and child, and the altars of his gods ? But 
if he will agree with you and me, he will confess that a thing, 
which is objectively false does not exist at all, and is nothing." 

A. " I suppose it is necessary to do so. But I know whither 
you are struggling." 

S. " To this dear youth, that, therefore, if a thing subjectively 
true be also objectively false, it does not exist, and is nothing." 

" It is so," said I. 

S. " Let us, then, let nothing go its own way, while we go on 
ours with that which is only objectively true, lest coming to a 
river over which it is subjectively true to us that there is a bridge, 
and trying to walk over that work of our own mind, but no one's 
hands, the bridge prove to be objectively false, and we, walking 
over the bank into the water, be set free from that which is sub- 
jective on the further bank of Styx." 

Then I, laughing, " This hardly coincides, Alcibiades, with 
Protagoras's opinion, that subjective truth was alone useful." 

" But rather proves," said Socrates, " that undiluted draughts 
of it are of a hurtful and poisonous nature, and require to be 
tempered with somewhat of objective truth, before it is safe to 
use them ; — at least in the case of bridges." 

" Did I not tell you," interrupted Alcibiades, " how the old de- 
ceiver would try to put me to bed of some dead puppy or log ? 
Or do you not see how, in order, after his custom, to raise a laugh 
about the whole question by vulgar examples he is blinking what 
he knows as well as I ? " 

S. " What then, fair youth ? " 

A. " That Protagoras was not speaking about bridges, or any 
other merely physical things, on which no difference of opinion 
need occur, because every one can satisfy himself by simply 
using his senses ; but concerning moral and intellectual matters, 
which are not cognizable by the senses, and therefore permit, 
without blame, a greater diversity of opinion. Error on such 
points, he told us — on the subject of religion, for example — was 
both pardonable and harmless ; for no blame could be imputed 
to the man who acted faithfully up to his own belief, whatsoever 
that might be." 

S. " Bravely spoken of him, and worthily of a free state. 
But tell me, Alcibiades, with what matters does religion deal." 



PHAETHOX. 2S7 

A. * With the Gods." 

S. •• Then it is not hurtful to speak false things of the Gods ? " 

A. " Not unless you know them to be false." 

S. u But answer me this, Aleibiades. If you made a mistake 
concerning numbers, as that twice two made rive, might it not be 
hurtful to you ? " 

A. - Certainly ; for I might pav away five obols instead of 
four." 

S. " And so be punished, not by any anger of two and two 
against you. but by those very necessary laws of number, which 
you had mistaken ? " 

A. - Yes." 

S. " Or if you made a mistake concerning music, as that two 
consecutive notes could produce harmony, that opinion also, if 
you acted upon it. would be hurtful to you ? " 

A. " Certainly : for I should make a discord, and pain my own 
ear-, and my hearers'."' 

S, •• And, in this case also, be punished, not by any anger of 
the lyre against you. but by those very necessary laws of music 
which vou had mistaken ? " 

A. "Ye*" 

S. •• Or if you mistook concerning a brave man. believing him 
to be a coward, might not this also be hurtful to you ? If. for 
instance, you attacked him carelessly, expecting him to run away, 
and he defended himself valiantly, and conquered you ; or if you 
neglected to call for his help in need, expecting him falsely, as 
in the former case, to run away : would not such a mistake be 
hurtful to you. and punish you. not by any anger of the man 
against you. but by your mistake itself? " 

A. " It is evident.'' 

S. *'• TTe may assume, then, that such mistakes at least are 
hurtful, and that they are liable to be punished by the very laws 
of that concerning which we mistake?'' 

A. " We may so assume.'* 

S. " Suppose, then, we were to say, • What argument is this of 
yours. Protagoras ? — that concerning lesser things, both intellect- 
ual and moral, such as concerning number, music, or the charac- 
ter of a man. mistakes are hurtful, and liable to bring punishment. 
in proportion to our need of using those things : but concerning 
the Gods, the very authors and lawgivers of number, music, 
human character, and all other things .whatsoever, mistakes are of 
no consequence, nor in any way hurtful to man, who stands in 
need of their help, not only in stress of battle, once or twice in 
his lite- as he might of the brave man. but always and in all 
things both outward and inward ? Does it not seem strange to 



288 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

you, for it does to me, that to make mistakes concerning such 
beings should not bring an altogether infinite and daily punish- 
ment, not by any resentment of theirs, but, as in the case of 
music or numbers, by the very fact of our having mistaken the 
laws of their being, on which the whole Universe depends ? ' — 
What do you suppose Protagoras would be able to answer if he 
faced the question boldly ? " 

A. " I cannot tell." 

S. " Nor I either. Yet one thing more it may be worth our 
while to examine. If one should mistake concerning God, will 
his error be one of excess or defect ? " 

A. " How can I tell ? " 

S. " Let us see. Is not Zeus more perfect than all other 
beings ? " 

A. " Certainly, if it be true that, as they say, the perfection of 
each kind of being is derived from him ; He must therefore be 
himself more perfect than any one of those perfections." 

S. " Well argued. Therefore, if he conceived of himself, 
his conception of himself would be more perfect than that of 
any man concerning him ? " 

A. " Assuredly ; if he have that faculty, he must needs have 
it in perfection." 

S. " Suppose, then, that he conceived of one of his own 
properties, such as his justice ; how large would that perfect con- 
ception of his be?" 

A. " But how can I tell, Socrates ? " 

S. " My good friend, would it not be exactly commensurate 
with that justice of his ? " 

A. " How then ? " 

S. " Wherein consists the perfection of any conception, save in 
this, that it be the exact copy of that whereof it is conceived, 
and neither greater nor less ? " 

A. " I see now." 

S. " Without the Pythia's help, I should say. But, tell me — 
We agree that Zeus's conception of his own justice will be exactly 
commensurate with his justice ? " 

A. " We do." 

S. " But man's conception thereof, it has been agreed, would 
be certainly less perfect than Zeus's ? " 

A. " It would." 

S. " Man, then, it seems, would always conceive God to be less 
just than God conceives himself to be ? " 

A. " He would." 

S. "And therefore to be less just, according to the argument, 
than he really is ? " 



PHAETHON. 289 

A. " True." 

S. " And therefore his error concerning Zeus, would be in this 
case an error of defect ? " 

A. "It would." 

S. " And so on of each of his other properties ? " 

A. " The same argument would likewise, as far as I can see, 
apply to them." 

S. " So that, on the whole, man, by the unassisted power of 
his own faculty, will always conceive Zeus to be less just, wise, 
good, and beautiful than he is ? " 

A. " It seems probable." 

S. " But does not that seem to you hurtful ? " 

A. " Why so ? " 

S. " As if, for instance, a man believing that Zeus loves him 
less than he really does, should become superstitious and self-tor- 
menting. Or, believing that Zeus will guide him less than he 
really will, he should go his way through life without looking 
for that guidance : or if, believing that Zeus cares about his con- 
quering his passions less than he really does, he should become 
careless and despairing in the struggle : or if, believing that Zeus 
is less interested in the welfare of mankind than He really is, he 
should himself neglect to assist them, and so lose the glory of 
being called a benefactor of his country : would not all these 
mistakes be hurtful ones ? " 

" Certainly," said I : but Alcibiades was silent. 

S. "And would not these mistakes, by the hypothesis, them- 
selves punish him who made them, without any resentment 
whatsoever, or Nemesis of the gods, being required for his 
chastisement ? " 

" It seems so," said I. 

S. " But can we say of such mistakes, and of the harm which 
may accrue from them, anything but that they must both be infi- . 
nite ; seeing that they are mistakes concerning an infinite Being, 
and his infinite properties, on every one of which, and on all 
together, our daily existence depends ? " 

P. " It seems so." 

S. " So that, until such a man's error concerning Zeus, the 
source of all things, is cleared up, either in this life or in some 
future one, we cannot but fear for him infinite confusion, misery, 
and harm, in all matters which he may take in hand ? " 

Then Alcibiades, angrily, — " What ugly mask is this you have 
put on, Socrates ? You speak rather like a priest trying to 
frighten rustics into paying their first-fruits, than a philosopher 
inquiring after that which is beautiful. But you shall never ter- 
rify me into believing that it is not a noble thing to speak out 

13 



290 KINGSLEY'8 MISCELLANIES. 

whatsoever a man believes, and to go forward boldly in the spirit 
of truth." 

S. " Feeling first, I hope, with your staff, as would be but 
reasonable in the case of the bridge, whether your belief was 
objectively or only subjectively true, lest you should fall through 
your subjective bridge into objective water. Nevertheless, leav- 
ing the bridge and the water, let us examine a little what this 
said spirit of truth may be. How do you define it ? " 

A. " I assert, that whosoever says honestly what he believes, 
does so by the spirit of truth." 

S. " Tben if Lyce, patting those soft cheeks of yours, were to 
say, ' Alcibiades, thou art the fairest youth in Athens/ she would 
speak by the spirit of truth ? " 

A. " They say so." 

S. "And they say rightly. But if Lyce, as is her custom, 
wished by so saying to cheat you into believing that she loved 
you, and thereby to wheedle you out of a new shawl, she would 
still speak by the spirit of truth?" 

A. " I suppose so." 

S. " But if, again, she said the same thing to Phaethon, she 
would still speak by the spirit of truth ? " 

" By no means, Socrates," said I, laughing. 

S. " Be silent, fair boy ; you are out of court as an interested 
party. Alcibiades shall answer. If Lyce, being really mad with 
love, like Sappho, were to believe Phaethon to be fairer than 
you, and say so, she would still speak by the spirit of truth ? " 

A. " I suppose so." 

S. " Do not frown ; your beauty is in no question. Only she 
would then be saying what is not true ? " 

" I must answer for him after all," said I. 

S. " Then it seems, from what has been agreed, that it is indif- 
ferent to the spirit of truth, whether it speak truth or not. The 
spirit seems to be of an enviable serenity. But suppose again, 
that I believed that Alcibiades had an ulcer on his leg, and were 
to proclaim the same now to the people, when they come into the 
Pnyx, should 1 not be speaking by the spirit of truth ? " 

A. " But that would be a shameful and blackguardly action." 

S. " Be it so. It seems, therefore, that it is indifferent to the 
spirit of truth whether that which it affirms be honourable or 
blackguardly. Is it not so ? " 

A. " It seems so, most certainly, in that case at least." 

S. " And in others, as I think. But tell me — Is not the man 
who does what he believes, as much moved by this yorrr spirit of 
truth as he who says what he believes ? " 

A. " Certainly he is." 



PHAETHON. 291 

S. " Then, if I believed it right to lie or steal, I, in lying or 
stealing, should lie or steal by the spirit of truth ? " 

A. " Certainly : but that is impossible." 

S. " My fine fellow, and wherefore ? I have heard of a nation 
among the Indians, who hold it a sacred duty to murder every 
one, not of their own tribe, whom they can waylay ; and when 
they are taken and punished by the rulers of that country, die 
joyfully under the greatest torments, believing themselves certain 
of an entrance into the Elysian Fields, in proportion to the 
number of murders which they have committed." 

A. " They must be impious wretches." 

S. "Be it so. But believing themselves to be right, they com- 
mit murder by the spirit of truth." 

A. '- It seems to follow from the argument." 

S. " Then it is indifferent to the spirit of truth, whether the 
action which it prompts be right or wrong ? " 

A. " It must be confessed." 

S. "It is therefore not a moral faculty, this spirit of truth. 
Let us see uoav whether it be an intellectual one. How are in- 
tellectual things defined, Phaethon ? Tell me, for you are cunning 
in such matters." 

P. "Those things which have to do with processes of the 
mind." 

S. " With right processes, or with wrong ? " 

P. " With right, of course." 

S. " And processes for what purpose ? " 

P. " For the discovery of facts." 

S. "Of facts as they are, or as they are not ? " 

P. "As they are." 

S. " And he who discovers facts as they are, discovers truth ; 
while he who discovers facts as they are not, discovers falsehood ? " 

P. " He discovers nothing, Socrates." 

S. " True ; but it has been agreed already that the spirit of 
truth is indifferent to the question whether facts be true or false, 
but only concerns itself with the sincere affirmation of them, 
whatsoever they may be. Much more then must it be indifferent 
to those processes by which they are discovered." 

P. "How so?" 

S. " Because it only concerns itself with afiirmation con- 
cerning facts ; but these processes are anterior to that affirma- 
tion." 

P. " I comprehend." 

S. " And much more is it indifferent to whether those are right 
processes or not." 

P. " Much more so." 



292 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

S. " It is therefore not intellectual. It remains, therefore, that 
it must be some merely physical faculty, like that of fearing, 
hungering, or enjoying the sexual appetite." 

A. " Absurd, Socrates ! " 

S. " That is the argument's concern, not ours : let us follow 
manfully whithersoever it may lead us." 

A. " Lead on, thou sophist ! " 

S. "It was agreed, then, that he who does what he thinks 
right, does so by the spirit of truth — was it not ? " 

A. " It was." 

S. " Then he who eats when he thinks that he ought to eat, 
does so by the spirit of truth ? " 

A. " What next ? " 

S. " This next, that he who blows his nose when he thinks 
that it wants blowing, blows his nose by the spirit of truth." 

A. " What next ? " 

S. " Do not frown, friend. Believe me, in such days as these, 
I honour even the man who is honest enough to blow his nose 
because he finds that he ought to do so. But tell me, — a horse, 
when he shies at a beggar, does not he also do so by the spirit 
of truth ? For he believes sincerely the beggar to be something 
formidable, and honestly acts upon his conviction." 

" Not a doubt of it," said I, laughing, in spite of myself, at 
Alcibiades's countenance. 

S. "It is in danger, then, of proving to be something quite 
brutish and doggish, this spirit of truth. I should not wonder, 
therefore, if we found it proper to be restrained." 

A. " How so, thou hair-splitter ? " 

S. " Have we not proved it to be common to man and animals ; 
but are not those passions which we have in common with animals 
to be restrained ? " 

P. " Restrain the spirit of truth, Socrates ? " 

S. " If it be doggishly inclined. As, for instance, if a man 
knew that his father had committed a shameful act, and were to 
publish it, he would do so by the spirit of truth. Yet such an 
act would be blackguardly, and to be restrained." 

P. " Of course." 

S. " But much more, if he accused his father only on his own 
private suspicion, not having seen him commit the act ; while 
many others, who had watched his father's character more than 
he did, assured him that he was mistaken." 

P. " Such an act would be to be restrained, not merely as 
blackguardly, but as impious." 

S. " Or if a man believed things derogatory to the character 
of the Gods, not having seen them do wrong himself, while all 



PHAETHON. 293 

y* 

those who had given themselves to the study of divine things 
assured him that he was mistaken, would he not be bound to re- 
strain an inclination to speak such things, even if he believed 
them ? " 

P. Surely, Socrates ; and that even if he believed that the 
Gods did not exist at all. For there would be far more chance 
that he alone was wrong, and the many right, than that the many 
were wrong, and he alone right. He would therefore commit an 
insolent and conceited action, and, moreover, a cruel and shame- 
less one ; for he would certainly make miserable, if he were be- 
lieved, the hearts of many virtuous persons who had never 
harmed him, for no immediate or demonstrable purpose except 
that of pleasing his own self-will ; and that much more, were he 
wrong in his assertion." 

S. " Here, then, is another case in which it seems proper to 
restrain the spirit of truth, whatsoever it may be? " 

P. " What, then, are we to say of those who speak fearlessly and 
openly their own opinions on every subject ? for, in spite of all 
this, one cannot but admire them, whether rationally or irration- 
ally." 

S. " We will allow them at least the honour which we do to 
the wild boar, who rushes fiercely through thorns and brambles 
upon the dogs, not to be turned aside by spears or tree-trunks, 
and indeed charges forward the more valiantly the more tightly 
he shuts his eyes. That praise we can bestow on him, but, I 
fear, no higher one. It is expedient, nevertheless, to have such 
a temperament, as it is to have a good memory, or a loud voice, 
or a straight nose, unlike mine ; only, like other animal passions, 
it must be restrained and regulated by reason and the law of 
right, so as to employ itself only on such matters and to such a 
degree as they prescribe." 

" It may seem so in the argument," said I. " Yet no argument, 
even of yours, Socrates, with your pardon, shall convince me 
that the spirit of truth is not fair and good, ay, the noblest pos- 
session of all ; throwing away which, a man throws away his 
shield, and becomes unworthy of the company of Gods or men." 

S. " Or of beasts either, as it seems to me and the argument. 
Nevertheless, to this point has the argument, in its cunning and 
malice, brought us by crooked paths. Can we find no escape ? " 

P. " I know none." 

S. " But may it not be possible that we, not having been ini- 
tiated, like Alcibiades, into the Babylonian mysteries, have some- 
what mistaken the meaning of that expression, ' spirit of truth ? ' 
For truth we defined to be ' facts as they are.' The spirit of 
truth then should mean, should it not, the spirit of facts as they 
are ? " 



294 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

P. " It should." 

S. " But what shall we say that this expression, in its turn, 
means ? The spirit which makes facts as they are ? " 

A. "Surely not. That would be the supreme Demiurgus 
himself." 

S. "Of whom you were not speaking, when you spoke of the 
spirit of truth ? " 

A. " Certainly not. I was speaking of a spirit in man." 

S. " And belonging to him ? " 

A. " Yes." 

S. " And doing — what, with regard to facts as they are ? for 
this is just the thing which puzzles me." 

A. " Telling facts as they are,", 

S. " Without seeing them as they are ? " 

A. " How you bore one ! of course not. It sees facts as they 
are, and therefore tells them." 

S. " But perhaps it might see them as they are, and find it ex- 
pedient, being of the same temperament as I, to hold its tongue 
about them ? Would it then be still the spirit of truth? " 

A. " It would, of course." 

S. " The man then who possesses the spirit of truth will see 
facts as they are ? " 

A. " He will." 

S. " And conversely ? " 

A. " Yes." 

S. " But if he sees anything only as it seems to him, and is 
not in fact, he will not, with regard to that thing, see it by the 
spirit of truth ? " 

A. " I suppose not." 

S. " Neither then will he be able to speak of it by the spirit 
of truth." 

A. "Why?" 

S. " Because, by what we agreed before, it will not be there 
to speak of, my wondrous friend ! For it appeared to us, if I 
recollect right, that facts can only exist as they are, and not as 
they are not, and that therefore the spirit of truth had nothing 
to do with any facts but those which are." 

" But," I interrupted, " O clear Socrates, I fear much that if 
the spirit of truth be such as this, it must be beyond the reach of 
man." 

S. " Why then ? " 

P. " Because the immortal Gods only can see things as they 
really are, having alone made all things, and ruling them all 
according to the laws of each. They therefore, I much fear, will 
be alone able to behold them, how they are really in their inner 



PHAETHON. 295 

nature and properties, and not merely from the outside, and by 
guess, as we do. How then can we obtain such a spirit ourselves ?" 

S. *• Dear boy, you seem to wish that I should, as usual, put 
you off with a myth, when you begin to ask me about those who 
know far more about me than I do about them. Nevertheless, 
shall I tell you a myth ? n 

P. *• It you have nothing better.'' 

S. u They say. then, that Prometheus, when he grew to man's 
estate, found mankind, though they were like him in form, ut- 
terly brutish and ignorant, so that, as JEsehylus says : — 

• Seeing th - rain, 

Heaiing they heard nor : but were like the shapes 

Long time did confuse all things 
At random : ' 

being, as I suppose, led like the animals, only by their private 
judgments of things as they seemed to each man. and enslaved 
to that subjective truth, which we found to be utterly careless 
and ignorant of facts as they are. But Prometheus, taking pity 
on them, determined in his mind to free them from that slavery 
and to teach them to rise above the beasts, by seeing things as 
they are. He therefore made them acquainted with the secrets 
of nature, and taught them to build houses, to work in wood 
and metals, to observe the courses of the stars, and ail other 
such arts and sciences, which if any man attempts to follow 
according to his private opinion, and not according to the rules 
of that art. which are independent of him and of his opinions, 
being discovered from the unchangeable laws of things as they 
are. he will fail. But yet as the myth relates, they became 
only a more cunning sort of animals : not being whollv freed 
from their original slavery to a certain subjective opinion about 
themselves, that each man should, by means of those arts and 
sciences, please and help himself only. Fearing, therefore, lest 
their increased strength and cunniug should only enable them 
to prey upon each other all the more fiercely, he stole tire 
from heaven, and gave to each man a share thereof for his 
hearth, and to each community for their common altar. And by 
the light of this celestial fire they learnt to see those celestial and 
eternal bonds between man and man,, as of husband to wife, of 
father to child, of citizen to his country, and of master to servant. 
without which man is but a biped without feathers, and which 
are in themselves, being independent of the flux of matter and 
time, most truly facts as they are. And since that time, whatso- 
ever household or nation has allowed these fires to become 
extinguished, has sunk down again to the level of the brutes : 
while those who have passed them down to their children bum- 



296 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

ing bright and strong, become partakers of the bliss of the He- 
roes, in the Happy Islands. It seems to me then, Phaethon 
and Alcibiades, that if we find ourselves in anywise destitute of 
this heavenly fire, we should pray for the coming of that day, 
when Prometheus shall be unbound from Caucasus, if by any 
means he may take, pity on us and on our children, and again 
bring us down from heaven that fire which is the spirit of truth, 
that we^may see facts as they are. For which if he were to ask 
Zeus humbly and filially, I cannot believe that he would refuse 
it. And indeed, I think that the poets, as is their custom, cor- 
rupt the minds of young men by telling them that Zeus chained 
Prometheus to Caucasus for his theft ; seeing that it befits such 
a ruler, as I take the Father of Gods and men to be, to know 
that his subjects can only do well by means of his bounty, and 
therefore to bestow it freely, as the kings of Persia do, on all 
who are willing to use it in the service of their sovereign." 

" So then," said Alcibiades laughing, " till Prometheus be 
unbound from Caucasus, we who have lost, as you seem to hint, 
this heavenly fire, must needs go on upon our own subjective 
opinions, having nothing better to which to trust. Truly, thou 
sophist, thy conclusion seems to me after all not to differ much 
from that of Protagoras." 

S. " Ah dear boy ! know you not that to those who have been 
initiated, and as they say in the mysteries, twice born, Prome- 
theus is always unbound, and stands ready to assist them ; while 
to those who are self-willed and conceited of their own opinions, 
he is removed to an inaccessible distance, and chained in icy 
fetters on untrodden mountain-peaks, where the vulture ever 
devours his fair heart, which sympathizes continually with the 
follies and the sorrows of mankind ? Of what punishment, then, 
must not those be worthy, who by their own wilfulness and self- 
confidence bind again to Caucasus the fair Titan, the friend of 
men ? " 

" By Apollo ! " said Alcibiades, " this language is more fit for 
the tripod in Delphos, than for the Bema in the Pnyx. So fare 
thee well, thou Pythoness! I must go and con over my ora- 
tion, at least if thy prophesying has not altogether addled my 
thoughts." 

But I, as soon as Alcibiades was gone, for I was ashamed to 
speak before, turning to Socrates said to him, all but weeping : — 

" Oh Socrates, what cruel words are these which you have 
spoken ? Are you not ashamed to talk thus contemptuously to 
one like me, even though he be younger and less cunning in 
argument than yourself ; knowing as you do, how, when I might 
have grown rich in my native city of Rhodes, and marrying 



PHAETHON. 297 

there, as my father purposed, a wealthy merchant's heiress, so 
have passed my life delicately, receiving the profits of many ships 
and warehouses, I yet preferred Truth beyond riches ; and leav- 
ing my father's house, came to Athens in search of wisdom, dis- 
sipating my patrimony upon one sophist after another, listening 
greedily to Hippias, and Polus, and Gorgias, and Protagoras, 
and last of all to you, hard-hearted man that you are ? For from 
my youth I loved and longed after nothing so much as Truth, 
whatsoever it may be ; thinking nothing so noble as to know that 
which is Right, and knowing it, to do it. And that longing, or 
love of mine, which is what I suppose Protagoras meant by the 
spirit of truth, I cherished as the fairest and most divine posses- 
sion, and that for which alone it was worth while to live. For 
it seemed to me, that even if in my search I never attained to 
truth, still it were better to die seeking, than not to seek ; and 
that even if acting by what I considered to be the spirit of truth, 
and doing honestly in every case that which seemed right, I 
should often, acting on a false conviction, offend in ignorance 
against the absolute righteousness of the Gods, yet that such an 
offence was deserving, if not of praise for its sincerity, yet at 
least of pity and forgiveness ; but by no means to be classed, as 
you class it, with the appetites of brutes ; much less to be threat- 
ened, as you threaten it, with infinite and eternal misery by I 
know not what necessary laws of Zeus, and to be put off at last 
with some myth or other about Prometheus. Surely your 
mother bare you a scoffer and pitiless, Socrates, and not, as you 
boast, a man-midwife fit for fair youths." 

Then, smiling sweetly, " Dear boy," said he, " were I such as 
you fancy, how should I be here now discoursing with you con- 
cerning truth, instead of conning my speech for the Pnyx, like 
Alcibiades, that I may become a demagogue, deceiving the mob 
with flattery, and win for myself houses, and lands, and gold, 
and slave-girls, and fame, and power, even to a tyranny itself? 
For in this way I might have made my tongue a profitable mem- 
ber of my body ; but now, being hurried up and down in barren 
places, like one mad of love, from my longing after fair youths, 
I waste my speech on them ; receiving, as is the wont of true 
lovers, only curses and ingratitude from their arrogance. But 
tell me, thou proud Adonis — This spirit of truth in thee, which 
thou thoughtest, and rightly, thy most noble possession — did it 
desire truth or not ? " 

P. "But, Socrates, I told you that very thing, and said that it 
was a longing after truth, which I could not restrain or disobey." 

S. " Tell me now, does one long for that which one possesses, 
or for that which one does not possess ? " 
13* 



298 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

P. " For that which one does not possess." 

S. " And is one in love with that which is one's self, or with that 
which is not ? " 

P. " With that which is not one's self, thou mocker. We are 
not all, surely, like Narcissus ? " 

S. " No, by the dog ! not quite all. But see now : it appears 
that when any one is in love with a thing, and longs for it, as 
thou didst for truth, it must be something which is not himself, 
and which he does not possess ? " 

P. " True." 

S. " You, then, while you were loving facts as they are, and 
longing to see them as they are, yet did not possess that which 
you longed for ? " 

P. a True, indeed ; else why should I have been driven forth 
by the anger of the gods, like Bellerophon, to pace the Aleian 
plain, eating my own soul, if I had possessed that for which I 
longed ? " 

S. " Well said, dear boy. But see again. This truth which 
you loved, and which was not yourself or part of yourself, was 
certainly also nothing of your own making ? — Though they say 
that Pygmalion was enamoured of the statue which he himself 
had carved." 

P. " But he was miserable, Socrates, till the statue became 
alive." 

S. "They say so; but what has that to do with the argu- 
ment ? " 

P. " I know not. But it seems to me horrible, as it did to 
Pygmalion, to be enamoured of anything which cannot return 
your love, but is, as it were, your puppet. Should we not think 
it a shameful thing, if a mistress were to be enamoured of one of 
her own slaves ? " 

S. " We should ; and that, I suppose, because the slave would 
have no free choice whether to refuse or to return his mistress's 
love ; but would be compelled, being a slave, to submit to her, 
even if she were old, or ugly, or hateful to him ? " 

P. "Of course." 

S. " And should we not say, Phaethon, that there was no true 
enjoyment in such love, even on the part of the mistress ; nay 
that it was not woithy of the name of love at all, but was merely 
something base, such as happens to animals ? " 

P. " We should say so rightly." 

S. " Tell me, then, Phaethon, — for a strange doubt has en- 
tered my mind on account of your words. — This truth of which 
you were enamoured, seems, from what has been agreed, not to 
be a part of yourself, nor a creation of your own, like Pygma- 



PHAETHON. 299 

lion's statue : — how then has it not happened to you to be even 
more miserable than Pygmalion till you were sure that truth 
loved you in return ? — and, moreover, till you were sure that 
truth had free choice as to whether it should return or refuse 
your love ? For, otherwise, you would be in danger of being 
found suffering the same base passion as a mistress enamoured 
of a slave who cannot resist her." 

P. " I am puzzled, Socrates." 

S. " Shall we rather say, then, that you were enamoured, not 
of truth itself, but of the spirit of truth ? For we have been all 
along defining truth to be ' facts as they are/ have we not ? " 

P. " We have." 

S. " But there are many facts as they are, whereof to be en- 
amoured would be base, for they cannot return your love. As, 
for instance, that one and one make two, or that a horse has four 
legs. With respect to such facts, you would be, would you not, 
in the same position as a mistress towards her slave ? " 

P. " Certainly. It seems, then, better to assume the other 
alternative." 

S. " It does. But does it not follow, that when you were en- 
amoured of this spirit, you did not possess it ? " 

P. " I fear so, by the argument." 

" And I fear, too, that we agreed that he only who possessed 
the spirit of truth saw facts as they are ; for that was involved 
in our definition of the spirit of truth." 

P. " But, Socrates, I knew, at least, that one and one made 
two, and that a horse had four legs. I must then have seen 
some facts as they are." 

S. " Doubtless, fair boy ; but not all." 

P. " I do not pretend to that." 

S. " But if you had possessed the spirit of truth, you would 
have seen all facts whatsoever as they are. For he who possesses 
a thing can surely employ it freely for all purposes which are 
not contrary to the nature of that thing ; can he not ?" 

P. " Of course he can. But if I did not possess the spirit of 
truth, how could I see any truth whatsoever ? " 

S. " Suppose, clear boy, that instead of your possessing it, it 
were possible for it to possess you ; and possessing you, to show 
you as much of itself, or as little, as it might choose, and concern- 
ing such things only as it might choose : would not that explain 
the dilemma ? " 

P. " It would assuredly." 

S. " Let us see, then, whether this spirit of truth may not be 
something which is capable of possessing you, and employing 
you, rather than of being possessed and employed by you. To 



300 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

me, indeed, this spirit seems likely to be some demon or deity, 
and that one of the greatest." 

P. "Why then?" 

S. " Can lifeless and material things see ? " 

P. " Certainly not ; only live ones." 

S. " This spirit, then, seems to be living ; for it sees things as 
they are." 

P. "Yes." 

S. " And it is also intellectual ; for intellectual facts can be 
only seen by an intellectual being." 

P. " True." 

S. " And also moral ; for moral facts can only be seen by a 
moral being." 

P. " True also." 

S. "But this spirit is. evidently not a man; it remains, there- 
fore, that it must be some demon." 

P. " But why one of the greatest ? " 

S. " Tell me, Phaethon, is not God to be numbered among 
facts as they are ? " 

P. "Assuredly; for he is before all others, and more eternal 
and absolute than all." 

S. " Then this spirit of truth must also be able to see God as 
he is." 

P. " It is probable." 

S. " And certain, if, as we agreed, it be the very spirit which 
sees all facts whatsoever as they are. Now tell me, can the less 
see the greater as it is ? " 

P. " I think not ; for an animal cannot see a man as he is, but 
only that part of him in which he is like an animal, namely, his 
outward figure and his animal passions ; but not his moral sense 
or reason, for of them it has itself no share." 

S. " True ; and in like wise, a man of less intellect could not 
see a man of greater intellect than himself, as he is, but only a 
part of his intellect." 

P. " Certainly." 

S. " And does not the same thing follow from what we said 
just now, that God's conceptions of himself must be the only 
perfect conceptions of him ? For if any being could see God 
as he is, the same would be able to conceive of him as he is ; 
which we agreed was impossible." 

P. " True." 

S. " Then, surely, this spirit which sees God as he is, must 
be equal with God." 

P. " It seems probable ; but none is equal to God except him- 
self." 



PHAETHOX. 301 

S. " Most true, Phaethon. But what shall we say now, but 
that this spirit of truth, whereof thou hast been enamour ed, is, 
according to the argument, none other than Zeus, who alone com- 
prehends all things, and sees them as they are, because he alone 
has given to each its inward and necessary laws ? " 

P. " But, Socrates, there seems something impious in the 
thought." 

S. " Impious, truly, if we held that this spirit of truth was a 
part of your own self. But we agreed that it was not a part of 
you, but something utterly independent of you," 

P. " Noble would the news be, Socrates, were it true ; yet it 
seems to me beyond belief." 

S. " Did we not prove just now concerning Zeus, that all mis- 
takes concerning him were certain to be mistakes of defect ? " 

P. " We did, indeed." 

S. " How do you know, then, that you have not fallen into 
some such error, and have suspected Zeus to be less condescend- 
ing towards you than he really is ? " 

P. " AYould that it were so ! But I fear it is too fair a hope." 

S. " Do I seem to thee now, clear boy, more insolent and un- 
feeling than Protagoras, when he tried to turn thee away from 
the search after absolute truth, by saying sophistically that it 
was an attempt of the Titans to scale heaven, and bade thee be 
content with asserting shamelessly and brutishly thine own sub- 
jective opinions ? For I do not bid thee scale the throne of 
Zeus, into whose presence none could arrive, as it seems to me, 
unless he himself willed it; but to believe that he has given 
thee from thy childhood a glimpse of his own excellence, that so 
thy heart, conjecturing, as in the case of a veiled statue, from 
one part the beauty of the rest, might become enamoured thereof, 
and long for that sight of him which is the highest and only 
good, that so his splendour may give thee light to see facts as 
they are." 

P. " Oh, Socrates ! and how is this blessedness to be attained ? " 

S. " Even as, the m}'ths relate, the Nymphs obtained the em- 
braces of the Gods ; by pleasing him and obeying him in all 
things, lifting up daily pare hands and a thankful heart, if by 
any means he may condescend to purge thine eyes, that thou 
mayest see clearly, and without those motes, and specks, and dis- 
tortions of thine own organ of vision, which flit before the eye- 
balls of those who have been drunk over-night, and which are 
called by sophists subjective truth ; watching everywhere anxi- 
ously and reverently for those glimpses of his beauty, which he 
will vouchsafe to thee more and more as thou provest thyself 
worthy of them, and will reward thy love by making thee more 



302 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

and more partaker of his own spirit of truth ; whereby seeing 
facts as they are, thou w T ilt see him who has made them ac- 
cording to his own ideas, that they may be a mirror of his un- 
speakable splendour. Is not this a fairer hope for thee, O 
Phaethon, than that which Protagoras held out to thee, — that 
neither seeing Zeus, nor seeing facts as they are, nor affirming 
any truth whatsoever, nor depending for thy knowledge on any 
one but thine own ignorant self, thou mightest nevertheless be 
so fortunate as to escape punishment ; not knowing, as it seems 
to me, that such a state of ignorance and blindfold rashness, even 
if Tartarus were a dream of the poets or the priests, is in itself 
the most fearful of punishments ? " 

P. " It is, indeed, my dear Socrates. Yet what are we to say 
of those who, sincerely loving and longing after knowledge, yet 
arrive at false conclusions, which are proved to be false by con- 
tradicting each other ? " 

S. " We are to say, Phaethon, that they have not loved knowl- 
edge enough to desire utterly to see facts as they are, but only to 
see them as they would w^ish them to be ; and loving themselves 
rather than Zeus, have wished to remodel in some things or other 
his universe, according to their own subjective opinions. By 
this, or by some other act of self-will, or self-conceit, or self-de- 
pendence, they have compelled Zeus, not, as I think, without pity 
and kindness to them, to withdraw from them in some degree the 
sight of his own beauty. We must, therefore, I fear, liken them 
to Acharis, the painter of Lemnos, who, intending to represent 
Phoebus, painted from a mirror a copy of his own defects and 
deformities ; or perhaps to that Nymph, who finding herself 
beloved by Phoebus, instead of reverently and silently returning 
the affection, boasted of it to all her neighbours, as a token of 
her own beauty, and despised the God ; so that he, being angry, 
changed her into a chattering magpie ; or again to Arachne, who 
having been taught the art of weaving by Athene, pretended to 
compete with her own instructress, and being metamorphosed by 
her into a spider, was condemned, like the sophists, to spin out 
of her own entrails endless ugly webs, which are destroyed, as 
soon as finished, by every slave-girl's broom." 

P. u But shall we despise and hate such, O Socrates ? " 

S. " No, dearest boy, we will rather pity and instruct them 
lovingly; remembering always that we shall become such as 
they the moment we begin to fancy that truth is our own posses- 
sion, and not the very beauty of Zeus himself, which he shows 
to those whom he will, and in such measure as he finds them 
worthy to behold. But to me, considering how great must be 
the condescension of Zeus in unveiling to any man, even the 



PHAETHON. 303 

worthiest, the least portion of his own loveliness, there has come 
at times a sort of dream, that the divine splendour will at last 
pierce through and illumine all dark souls, even in the house of 
Hades, showing them, as by a great sunrise, both what they 
themselves, and what all other things are, really and in the sight 
of Zeus ; which if it happened, even to Ixion, I believe that his 
wheel would stop, and his fetters drop off of themselves, and 
that he would return freely to the upper air, for as long as he 
himself might choose." 

Just then the people began to throng into the Pnyx ; and we 
took our places with the rest to hear the business of the day, 
after Socrates had privately uttered this prayer : — 

" O Zeu, give to me and to all who shall counsel here this day, 
that spirit of truth by which we may behold that whereof we 
deliberate, as it is in thy sight ! " 



"As I expected," said Templeton, with a smile, as I folded up 
my manuscript. " My friend the parson could not demolish the 
poor Professor's bad logic without a little professional touch by 
way of finish." 

" What do you mean ? " 

" Oh — never mind. Only I owe you little thanks for sweeping 
away any one of my lingering sympathies with Mr. Windrush, if 
all you can offer me instead is the confounded old nostrum of 
religion over again." 

" Heyday, friend ! What next ? " 

" Really, my dear fellow, I beg your pardon. I forgot that I 
was speaking to a clergyman." 

" Pray don't beg my pardon on that ground. If what you say 
be right, a clergyman above all others ought to hear it ; and if it 
be wrong, and a symptom of spiritual disease, he ought to hear 
it all the more. But I cannot tell whether you are right or 
wrong, till I know what you mean by religion ; for there is a 
great deal of very truly confounded and confounding religion 
abroad in the world just now, as there has been in all ages ; and 
perhaps you may be alluding to that." 

Templeton sat silent for a few minutes, playing with the tackle 
in his fly-book, and then murmured to himself the well-known 
lines of Lucretius : — 



304 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

" i Humana ante oculos foede cum vita jaceret 
In terris oppressa gravi sub Eelligione 
Quse caput a cceli regionibus ostendebat, 
Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans : — ' 

" . . . . There ! — blasphemous, reprobate fellow, am I not ? " 

" On the contrary/' I said, u I think that in the sense in which 
Lucretius intended that the lines should be taken, they contain a 
great deal of truth. He had seen the basest and foulest crimes 
spring from that which he calls JRelligio, and he had a full right 
to state that fact. I am not aware that one blasphemes the 
Catholic and Apostolic Faith by saying that the devilries of the 
Spanish Inquisition were the direct offspring of that ' religious 
sentiment' which Mr. Windrush's school — though they are at all 
events right in saying that its source is in man himself, and not 
in the regionibus Cceli — are now glorifying, as something which 
enables man to save his own soul without the interference of 
i The Deity,' — indeed, whether ' The Deity ' chooses or not." 

" Do leave those poor Emersonians alone for a few minutes, 
and tell me how you can reconcile what you have just said with 
your own dialogue ? " 

"Why not?" 

" Is not Lucretius glorying in the notion that the Gods do not 
trouble themselves with mortals, while you have been asserting 
that ' The Deity ' troubles himself even with the souls of 
heathens ? " 

" Certainly. But that is quite a distinct matter from his dis- 
like of what he calls ' Relligio? In that dislike I can sympa- 
thize fully : but on his method of escape Mr. Windrush will 
probably look with more complaisance than I do, who call it by 
the ugly name of Atheism." 

u Then I fear you would call me an Atheist, if you knew all. 
So we had better say no more about it." 

" A most curious speech, certainly, to make to a parson, or 
soul-curer by profession ! " * 

" Why, what on earth have you to do but to abhor and flee 
me ? " asked he, with a laugh, though by no means a merry one. 

" Would your having a headache be a reason for the medical 
man's running away from you, or coming to visit you ? " 

" Ah, but this, you know, is my * fault,' and my ' crime/ and 
my k sin.' Eh ? " and he laughed again. 

" Would the doctor visit you the less, because it was your own 
fault that your head ached ? " 

" Ah, but suppose I professed openly no faith in his powers of 
curing, and had a great hankering after unaccredited Homoeo- 
pathies, like Mr. Windrush's ; would not that be a fair cause 



PHAETHON. 305 

for interdiction from fire and water, sacraments and Christian 
burial?" 

"Come, come, Templeton," I said; " you shall nor thus jest 
away serious thoughts with an old friend. I know you are ill at 
ease. Why not talk over the matter with me fairly and soberly ? 
How do you know, till you have tried, whether I can help you or 
not ? " 

" Because I know that your arguments will have no force with 
me ; they will demand of me, or assume in me, certain faculties, 
sentiments, notions, experiences — call them what you like — I am 
beginning to suspect sometimes with Cabanis that they are .' a 
product of the small intestines ! ' — which I never have had, and 
never could make myself have, and now don't care whether I 
have them or not." 

" On my honour, I will address you only as what you are, and 
know yourself to be. But what are these* faculties, so strangely 
beyond my friend Templeton's reach ? He used to be distin- 
guished at college for a very clear head, and a very kind heart, 
and the nicest sense of honour which I ever saw in living man ; 
and I have not heard that they have failed him since he became 
Templeton of Templeton. And as for his Churchmanship, were 
not the county papers ringing last month with the accounts of the 
beautiful new church which he had built, and the stained glass 
which he brought from Belgium, and the marble font which he 
brought from Italy ; and how he had even given for an altar- 
piece his own pet Luini, the gem of Templeton House ? " 

" Effeminate picture ! " he said. " It was part and parcel of 
the idea. . . ." 

Before I could ask him what he meant, he looked up suddenly 
at me with deep sadness on his usually nonchalant face. 

" Well, my dear fellow, I suppose I must tell you all, as I 
have told you so much without your shaking the dust off your 
feet against me, and consulting Bradshaw for the earliest train to 
Shrewsbury. You knew my dear mother ? " 

" I did. The best of women." 

" The best of women, and the best of mothers. But, if you 
recollect, she was a great Low-church saint." 

" Why ' but ' ? How does that derogate in any wise from her 
excellence." 

" Not from her excellence ; God forbid ! or from the excellence 
of the people of her own party, whom she used to have round 
her, and who were, some of them, I do believe, as really earnest, 
and pious, and charitable, and all that, as human beings could be. 
But it did take away very much indeed from her influence on 
me." 



306 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

" Surely she did not neglect to teach you." 

" It is a strange thing to say, but she rather taught rne too 
much. I don't deny that it may have been my own fault. I 
don't blame her, or any one. But you know what I was at col- 
lege — no worse than other men, I dare say ; but no better. I 
had no reason for being better." 

" No reason ? Surely she gave you reasons." 

" There — you have touched the ailing nerve now. The rea- 
sons were what you would call paralogisms. They had no more 
to do with me than with those trout." 

" You mistake, friend, you mistake, indeed," said I. 

" I don't mistake at all about this ; that whether or not the 
reasons in themselves had to dojwith me, the way in which she 
put them made them practically so much Hebrew. She de- 
manded of me, as the only grounds on which I was to consider 
myself safe from hell, certain fears and hopes which I did not 
feel, and experiences which I did not experience ; and it was my 
fault, and a sign of my being in a wrong state — to use no harder 
term — that I did not feel them ; and yet it was only God's grace 
which could make me feel them : and so I grew up with a dark 
secret notion that I was a very bad boy : but that it was God's 
fault and not mine that I was so." 

"You were ripe indeed then," said I sadly, "like hundreds 
more, for Professor Windrush's teaching." 

" I will come to that presently. But in the mean time, — was 
it my fault ? I was never what you call a devout person. My 
6 organ of veneration,' as the phrenologists would say, was never 
very large. I was a shrewd dashing boy, enjoying life to the 
finger-tips, and enjoying above all, I will say, pleasing my mother 
in every way, except in the understanding what she told me, — 
and what I felt I could not understand. But as I grew older, 
and watched her, and the men round her, I began to suspect that 
religion and effeminacy had a good deal to do with each other. 
For the women, whatsoever their temperaments, or even their 
tastes might be, took to this to me incomprehensible religion 
naturally and instinctively : while the very few men who were 
in their clique were— I don't deny some of them were good men 
enough — if they had been men at all : if they had been well- 
read, or well-bred, or gallant, or clear-headed, or liberal-minded, 
or, in short, any thing but the silky, smooth-tongued hunt-the- 
slippers nine out of ten of them were. I recollect well asking 
my mother once, whether there would not be five times more 
women than men in heaven, — and her answering me sadly and 
seriously, that she feared thqre would be. And in the mean 
time she brought me up to pray and hope that I might some day 



PHAETHOX. 307 

be converted, and become a child of God. . . . And one could 
not help wishing to enjoy one's self as much as possible before that 
event happened." 

" Before that event happened, my dear fellow ? Pardon me, 
but your tone is somewhat irreverent." 

« Very likely. I had no reason put before me for regarding 
such a change as any thing but an unpleasant doom, which would 
cut me off, or ought to do so, from field sports, from poetry, from 
art, from science, from politics, — for Christians, I was told, had 
nothing to do with the politics of this world, — from man and all 
man's civilization in short ; and leave to me, as the only two 
lawful indigencies, those of living in a good house, and beget- 
ting a family of children." 

"And did you throw off the old Creeds for the sake of the 
civilization which you fancied that they forbid ? " 

" No ... I am a Churchman, you know ; principally on 
political grounds, or from custom, or from, — the devil knows 
what, perhaps, — I do not." 

" Probably it is God, and not the devil, who knows why, Tem- 
pleton." 

" Be it so . . . Frightful as it is to have to say it ... I do 
not so much care ... I suppose it is all right : if it is not, it 
will all come right at last. And in the mean time, I compro- 
mise, like the rest of the world ; and hear Jane making the chil- 
dren every week-day pray that they may become God's children, 
and then teaching them every Sunday evening the Catechism, 
which says that they are so already. I don't understand it. . . . 
I suppose if it was important, one would understand it. One knows 
right from wrong, you know, and other fundamentals. If that 
were necessary, one would know that too." 

ft But can you submit quietly to such a barefaced contradic- 
tion ? " 

" I ? I am only a plain country squire. Of course I should 
call such dealing with an act of parliament a lie and a sham . . . 
But^ about these things, I fancy, the women know best. Jane is 
ten thousand times as good as I am . . . you don't know half her 
worth. . . . And I haven't the heart to contradict her, — nor the 
right either ; for I have no reasons to give her ; no faith to sub- 
stitute for hers." 

" Our friend, the High-church curate, could have given you a 
few plain reasons, I should think." 

" Of course he could. And I believe in my heart the man is 
in the right in calling Jane wrong. He has honesty and com- 
mon sense on his side, just as he has when he calls the present 
state of Convocation, in the face of that prayer for God's Spirit 



308 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

on its deliberations, a blasphemous lie and sham. Of course it is. 
Any ensign in a marching regiment could tell us that, from his 
mere sense of soldier's honour. But then — if she is wrong, is he 
right ? How do I know ? I want reasons : he gives me historic 
authorities." 

" And very good things too ; for they are fair phenomena for 
induction." 

" But how will proving to me that certain people once thought 
a thing right, prove to me that it is right ? Good people think 
differently every day. Good people have thought differently about 
those very matters in every age. I want some proof which will 
coincide with the little which I do know about science and phi- 
losophy. They must fight out their own battle, if they choose to 
fight it on mere authority. If one could but have the implicit 
faith of a child, it would be all very well : but one can't. If one 
has once been fool enough to think about these things, one must 
have reasons, or something better than mere ipse dixits, or one 
can't believe them. I should be glad enough to believe ; — Do 
you suppose that I don't envy poor dear Jane from morning to 
night ? — but I can't. And so . . . ." 

" And so what ? " I asked. 

" And so, I believe, I am growing to have no religion at all, 
and no substitute for it either ; for I feel I have no ground or 
reason for admiring or working out any subject. I have tired of 
philosophy. — Perhaps it's all wrong, — at least I can't see what it 
has to do with God, and Christianity, and all which, if it is true, 
must be more important than any thing else. I have tired of art 
for the same reason. How can I be any thing but a wretched 
dilettante, when I have no principles to ground my criticism on, 
beyond bosh about ' The Beautiful ? ' I did pluck up heart and 
read Mr. Ruskin's books greedily when they came out, because I 
heard he was a good Christian. But I fell upon a little tract of 
his, Notes on Sheep/olds, and gave him up again, when I found 
that he had a leaning to that ' Clapham sect.' I have dropped 
politics : for I have no reason, no ground, no principle in them, 
but expediency. When they asked me this summer to represent 
the interests of the County in parliament, I asked them how they 
came to make such a mistake as to fancy that I knew what was 
their interest, or any one else's ? I am becoming more and more 
of an animal ; — fragmentary, inconsistent, seeing to the root of 
nothing, unable to unite things in my own mind. I just do the 
duty which lies nearest, and looks simplest. I try to make the 
boys grow up plucky and knowing, — though what's the use of it ? 
They will go to college with even less principles than I had, and 
will get into proportionably worse scrapes. I expect to be ruined 



PHAETHON. 309 

by their debts before I die. And for the rest, I read nothing but 
the Edinburgh and the Agricultural Gazette. My talk is of bul- 
locks. I just know right from wrong enough to see that the 
farms are in good order, pay my labourers living wages, keep the 
old people out of the workhouse, and see that my cottages and 
schools are all right ; for I suppose I was put here for some pur- 
pose of that kind, — though what it is, I can't very clearly define. 
. . . And there's an end of my long story." 

" Not quite an animal yet, it seems ? " said I with a smile, half 
to hide my own sadness at a set of experiences which are, alas ! 
already far too common, and will soon be more common still. 

" Nearer it than you fancy. I am getting fonder and fonder 
of a good dinner and a second bottle of claret ; about their mean- 
ing there is no mistake. And my principal reason for taking the 
hounds two years ago, was, I do believe, to have something to do 
in the winter which required no thought, and to have an excuse 
for falling asleep after dinner, instead of arguing with Jane about 

her scurrilous religious newspapers There is a great gulf 

opening, I see, between me and her And as I can't bridge 

it over, I may as well forget it. Pah ! I am boring you, and 
over-talking myself. Have a cigar, and let us say no more about 
it. There is more here, old fellow, than you will cure by doses 
of Socratic Dialectics." 

" I am not so sure of that," I replied. " On the contrary, I 
should recommend you in your present state of mind to look out 
your old Plato as quickly as possible, and see if he and his mas- 
ter Socrates cannot give you, if not altogether a solution for your 
puzzle, at least a method whereby you may solve it yourself. 
But tell me first — what has all this to do with your evident sym- 
pathy for a man so unlike yourself as Professor Windrush ? " 

" Perhaps I feel for him principally because he has broken 
loose from it all in desperation, just as I have. But to tell you 
the truth, I have been reading more than one book of his school 
lately ; and, as I said, I owe you no thanks for demolishing the 
little comfort which I seemed to find in them." 

" And what was that then ? " 

" Why — in the first place, you can't deny that however inco- 
herent they may be, they do say a great many clever things, and 
noble things too, about man, and society, and art, and nature." 

" No doubt of it." 

" And moreover, they seem to connect all they say with — 
with — I suppose you will laugh at me — with God, and spiritual 
truths, and eternal Divine laws ; in short, to consecrate common 
matters in that very W^y, which I could not find in my poor 
mother's teaching." 



310 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

" No doubt of that either. And therein is one real value of 
them, as protests in behalf of something nobler and more un- 
selfish than the mere dollar-getting spirit of their country." 

" Well, then, can you not see how pleasant it was to me to 
find some one who would give me a peep into the unseen world, 
without requiring as an entrance-fee any religious emotions and 
experiences ? Here I had been for years, shut out ; told that I 
had no business with any thing eternal, and pure, and noble, and 
good ; that to all intents and purposes I was nothing better than 
a very cunning animal who could be damned ; because I was still 
' carnal/ and had not been through all Jane's mysterious sorrows 
and joys. And it was really good news to me to hear that they 
were not required after all, and that all I need do was to be a 
good man, and leave devotion to those who were inclined to it 
by temperament." 

" Not to be a good man," said I, " but only a good specimen of 
some sort of man. That, I think, w T ould be the outcome of 
Emerson's ' Representative Men,' or of those most tragic ' Me- 
moirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.' " 

" How then, hair-splitter ? What is the mighty difference ? " 

" Would you call Dick Turpin a good man, because he was a 
good highwayman ? " 

" What now ? " 

" That he would be an excellent representative man of his 
class ; and therefore, on Mr. Emerson's grounds, a fit subject for 
a laudatory lecture." 

" I hate reductiones ad absurdum. Let Turpin take care of 
himself. I suppose I do not belong to such a very bad sort of 
men, but that it may be worth my while to become a good speci- 
men of it ? " 

" Certainly not ; only I think, contrary to Mr. Emerson's 
opinion, that you will not become even that, unless you first 
become something better still, namely, a good man." 

" There you are too refined for me. But can you not under- 
stand, now, the causes of my sympathy even with Windrush and 
his ' spirit of truth? ' " 

" I can, and those of many more. It seems that you thought 
you found in that school a wider creed than the one to which you 
had been accustomed ? " 

" There was a more comprehensive view of humanity about 
them, and that pleased me." 

"Doubtless, one can be easily comprehensive, if one compre- 
hends good and bad, true and false, under one category, by 
denying the absolute existence of either goodness or badness, 
truth or falsehood. But let the view be as comprehensive as it 



PHAETHON. 311 

will, I am afraid that the creed founded thereon will not be very 
comprehensive." 

"Why then?" 

" Because it will comprehend so few people ; fewer, even, 
than the sect of those who will believe with Mr. Emerson, that 
Bacon, like The Lord, is one of the ' heroes who have become 
bores at last ' by being too much obeyed, and that Harvey and 
Newton made their discoveries by the 'Aristotelian method.' 
The sect of those who believe that there is no absolute right and 
wrong, no absolute truth external to himself, discoverable by man, 
will, it seems to me, be a very narrow one to the end of time ; 
owing to a certain primeval superstition of our race, who, even 
in barbarous countries, have always been Platonists enough to 
have some sort of instinct and hope that there was a right and a 
wrong, and truths independent of their own sentiments and facul- 
ties. So that, though this school may enable you to fancy that 
you understand Lady Jane somewhat more, by the simple ex- 
pedient of putting on her religious experiences an arbitrary in- 
terpretation of your own, which she would indignantly and justly 
deny, it will enable her to understand you all the less, and widen 
the gulf between you immeasurably." 

" You are severe." 

" I only wish you to face one result of a theory, which while 
it pretends to offer the most comprehensive liberality, will be 
found to lead in practice to the most narrow and sectarian Epi- 
curism for a cultivated few. But for the many, struggling with 
the innate consciousness of evil, in them and around them, — an 
instinctive consciousness which no argumentation about ' evil 
being a lower form of good,' will ever explain away to those who 
4 grind among the iron facts of life, and have no time for self- 
deception ' — what good news for them is there in Mr. Emerson's 
cosy and tolerant Epicurism ? They cry for deliverance from 
their natures; they know that they are not that which they were in- 
tended to be, because they follow their natures ; and he answers 
them with, ' Follow your natures, and be that which you were in- 
tended to be.' You began this argument by stipulating that I 
should argue with you simply as a man. Does Mr. Emerson's 
argument look like doing that, or only arguing as with an indi- 
vidual of that kind of man, or rather animal, to which some iron 
Fate has compelled you to belong ? " 

" But, I say, these books have made me a better man." 

" I do not doubt it. An earnest cultivated man, speaking his 
whole mind to an earnest cultivated man, will hardly fail of 
telling him something he did not know before. But if you had 
not been a cultivated man, Templeton, a man with few sorrows, 



312 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

and trials, and few unsatisfied desires — if you had been the vil- 
lage shopkeeper, with his bad debts, and his temptations to make 
those who can, pay for those who cannot, — if you had been one 
of your own labourers, environed with the struggle for daily bread, 
and the alehouse, and hungry children, and a sick wife, and a 
dull taste, and a duller head, — in short, if you had been a man 
such as nine out of ten are, — what would his school have taught 
you then ? You want some truths which are common to men as 
men, which will help and teach them, let their temperament or 
their circumstances be what they will — do you not ? If you do 
not, your complaint of Lady Jane's exclusive creed is a mere 
selfish competition on your part, between a creed which will fit 
her peculiarities, and a creed which will fit your i^puliarities. 
Do you not see that ? " 

" I do — go on." 

" Then I say you will not find that in Professor Windrush's 
school. I say you will find it Lady Jane's Creed." 

" What ? In the very creed which excludes me ? " 

" Whether that creed excludes you or not is a question of the 
true meaning of its words. And that again is a question of Dia- 
lectics. I say it includes you and all mankind." 

" You must mistake her doctrines, then." 

" I do not, I assure you. I know what they are ; and I know, 
also, the misreading of them to which your dear mother's school 
has accustomed her, and which has taught her that these creeds 
only belong to the few who have discovered their own share in 
them. But whether the creeds really do that or not, — whether 
Lady Jane does not implicitly confess that they do not by her 
own words and deeds of every day, that I say, is a question of 
Dialectics, in the Platonic sense of that word, as the science which 
discovers the true and false in thought, by discovering the true 
and false concerning the meanings of words, which represent 
thought." 

" Be it so. I should be glad to hold what Jane holds, for the 
sake of the marvellous practical effect on her character — sweet 
creature that she is ! — which it has produced in the last seven 
years." 

" And which effect, I presume, was not increase I by her 
denying to you any share in the same ? " 

"Alas, no ! It is only when she falls on that — when she be- 
gins denouncing and excluding — that all the old faults, few and 
light as they are, seem to leap into ugly life again for the 
moment." 

" Few and light, indeed ! Ah, my dear Templeton, the gulf 
between you and happiness looks wide ; but only because it is 
magnified in mist." 



PHAETHON. 313 

" Which you would have me disperse by lightning-flashes of 
Dialectics, eh ? Well, every man his nostrum." 

" I have not. My method is not my own, but Plato's." 

" But, my good fellow, the Windrush School admire Plato as 
much as you do, and yet certainly arrive at somewhat different 
conclusions." 

" They do Plato the honour of patronizing him, as a Represen- 
tative Man ; but their real text-book, you will find, is Proclus. 
That hapless Philosophaster's a priori method, even his very 
verbiage, is dear to their souls ; for they copy it through wet and 
dry, through sense and nonsense. But as for Plato, — when I 
find them using Plato's weapons, I shall believe in their under- 
standing and love of him." 

" And in the meanwhile, claim him as a new verger for the 
Reformed Church Catholic?" 

" Not a new verger, Templeton. Augustine said, fourteen 
hundred years ago, that Socrates was the philosopher of the 
Catholic Faith. If he has not seemed so of late years, it is, I 
suspect, because we do not understand quite the same thing as 
Augustine did, when we talk of the Catholic Faith and Chris- 
tianity." 

" But you forget, in your hurry of clerical confidence, that the 
question still remains, whether these Creeds are true." 

" That, too, as I take it, is a question of Dialectics, unless you 
choose to reduce the whole to a balance-of-probabilities-argument, 
— rather too narrow a basis for a World-faith to stand upon. 
Try all 'mythic' theories, Straussite and others, by honest Dia- 
lectics. Try your own thoughts and experiences, and the accred- 
ited thoughts and experiences of wise men, by the same method. 
Mesmerism and ' The Development of Species ' may wait till 
they have settled themselves somewhat more into sciences ; at 
present it does not much matter what agrees or disagrees with 
them. But using this weapon fearlessly and honestly, you will, 
unless Socrates and Plato were fools, arrive at absolute eternal 
truths, which are equally true for all men, good or bad, conscious 
or unconscious ; and I tell you — of course you need not believe 
me till you have made trial — that those truths will coincide with 
the plain, honest meaning of the Catholic Creeds, as determined 
by the same method, — the only one, indeed, by which they or 
anything else can be determined." 

" You forget Baconian induction, of which you are so fond." 

" And pray what are Dialectics, but strict Baconian induction 
applied to words, as the phenomena of mind, instead of to things, 
the phenomena of " 

"What?" 

14 



314 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

" I can't tell you ; or, rather, I will not. I have my own 
opinion about what those trees and stones are ; but it will require 
a few years more verification before I tell." 

" Really, you and your Dialectics seem in a hopeful and valiant 
state of mind." 

" Why not ? Can truth do any thing but conquer ? " 

" Of course — assuming, as every one does, that the truth is 
with you." 

" My dear fellow, I have seldom met a man who could not be 
a far better dialectician than I shall ever be, if he would but use 
his Common Sense." 

" Common Sense ? That really sounds something like a bathos, 
after the great big Greek word which you have been propound- 
ing to me as the cure for all my doubts." 

" What ? Are you about to ' gib ' after all, just as I was flat- 
tering myself that I had broken you in to go quietly in harness ? " 

" I am very much minded to do so. The truth is, I cannot 
bring myself to believe that the universal panacea lies in an ob- 
scure and ancient scientific method." 

" Obscure and ancient ? Did I not just say that any man 
might be a dialectician ? Did Socrates ever appeal to any faculty 
but the Common Sense of man as man, which exists just as much 
in England now, I presume, as it did in Athens in his day ? 
Does he not, in pursuance 'of that method of his, draw his argu- 
ments and illustrations, to the horror of the big-worded Sophists, 
from dogs, kettles, fish-wives, and what not which is vulgar and 
common-place ? Or did I, in my clumsy attempt to imitate him, 
make use of a single argument which does not lie, developed or 
undeveloped, in the Common Sense of every clown ; in that 
human reason of his, which is part of God's image in him, and 
in every man ? And has not my complaint against Mr. Wind- 
rush's school been, that they will not do this ; that they will not 
accept the ground which is common to men as men, but disregard 
that part of the ' Vox Populi ' which is truly * Vox Dei,' for that 
which is ' Yox Diaboli ' — for private sentiments, fancies, and 
aspirations ; and so casting away the common sense of mankind, 
build up each man on the pin's point of his own private judg- 
ment, his own inverted pyramid ? " 

" But are you not asking me to do just the same, when you 
propose to me to start as a Scientific Dialectician ? " 

« Why, what are Dialectics, or any other scientific method, but 
conscious Common Sense ? And what is common sense, but 
unconscious scientific method ? Every man is a dialectician, be 
he scholar or boor, in as far as he tries to use no words which he 
does not understand, and to sift his own thoughts, and his expres- 



PHAETHON. 315 

sions of them, by that reason which is at once common to men, 
and independent of them." 

" As M. Jourdain talked prose all his life without knowing it. 
Well ... I prefer the unconscious method. I have as little 
faith as Mr. Carlyle would have in saying, ' Go to, let us make ' 
— an induction about words, or any thing else. It seems to me 
no very hopeful method of finding out facts as they are." 

" Certainly ; provided you mean any particular induction, and 
not a general inductive and severely-inquiring habit of mind ; 
that very ' Go to' being a fair sign that you have settled before- 
hand what the induction shall be ; in plain English, that you 
have come to your conclusion already, and are now looking about 
for facts to prove it. But is it any wiser to say, ' Go to, I will 
1 be conscious of being unconscious of being conscious of my own 
forms of thought ? ' For that is what you do say, when, having 
read Plato, and knowing his method, and its coincidence with 
Common Sense, you determine to ignore it on common-sense 
questions." 

" But why not ignore it, if mother-wit does as well ? " 

" Because you cannot ignore it. You have learnt it more or 
less, and cannot forget it, try as you w T ill, and must either follow 
it, or break it and talk nonsense. And moreover, you ought not 
to ignore it. For it seems to me, that you were sent to Cam- 
bridge by One greater than your parents, in order that you might 
learn it, and bring it home hither for the use of the M. Jourdains 
round you here, who have no doubt been talking prose all their 
life, but may have been also talking it very badly." 

" You speak riddles." 

" My dear fellow, may not a man employ Reason, or any other 
common human faculty, all his life, and yet employ them very 
clumsily and defectively ? " 

" I should say so, from the gross amount of human unwisdom." 

" And that, in the case of uneducated persons, happens because 
they are not conscious of those faculties, or of their right laws, 
but use them blindly and capriciously, by fits and starts, talking 
sense on one point, and nonsense on another ? " 

" Too true, Heaven knows." 

" But the educated man, if education mean any thing, is the 
man who has become conscious of those common human faculties 
and their laws, and has learnt to use them continuously and accu- 
rately, on all matters alike." 

" True, O Socraticule ! " 

" Then is it not his especial business to teach the right use of 
them to the less educated ? — unless you agree with the old So- 
phists, that the purpose of education is to enable us to deceive or 
coerce the uneducated for our own aggrandizement." 



316 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

" I am therefore, it seems, to get up Platonic Dialectics simply 
in order to teach my ploughmen to use their Common Sense ? " 

" Exactly so. Teach yourself first, and every one around you 
afterwards, not the doctrines, nor the formulae — though he had 
none— but the habit of mind which Socrates tried in vain to 
teach the Athenian youth. Teach them to face all questions 
patiently and fearlessly ; to begin always by asking every word, 
great or small, from ' Predestination ' to ' Protection/ what it 
really means. Teach them that ' By your words you shall be 
justified, and by your words you shall be condemned,' is no bar- 
ren pulpit-text, but a tremendous practical law for every day, 
and for every matter. Teach them to be sure that man can find 
out truth, because God his Father and Archetype will show it to 
those who hunger after it. Try to make them see clearly the* 
Divine truths which are implied, not only in their creeds, but in 
their simplest household words ; and " 

" And fail as Socrates failed, or rather worse ; for he did teach 
himself; but I shall not ev^n do that." 

" Do not despair in haste. In the first place, I deny that 
Socrates taught himself, for I believe that One taught him, who 
has promised to teach every man who desires wdsdom ; and in 
the next place, I have no fear but that the sound practical intel- 
lect which That Same One has bestowed on the Englishman, 
will give you a far better auditory in any harvest field, than 
Socrates could find among the mercurial Athenians of a fallen 
age." 

" Well, that is, at all events, a comfort for poor me. I will 
really take to my Plato again, till the hunting begins." 

" And even then, you know, you don't keep two packs ; so you 
will have three days out of the six wherein to study him." 

" Four, you mean, — for I have long given up reading Sunday 
books on Sunday." 

" Then read your Bible and Prayer-book ; or even borrow 
some of Lady Jane's devotional treatises ; and try, after you have 
translated the latter into plain English, to make out what they 
one and all really do mean, by the light which old Socrates has 
given you during the week. You will find them wiser than you 
fancy, and simpler also." 

" So be it, my dear Soul-doctor. Here come Lewis and the 
luncheon." 

And so ended our conversation. 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 317 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS.* 

FOUR LECTURES 

DELIVERED AT THE PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTION, EDINBURGH. 

" Our little systems have their day; 

They have their day and cease to be ; 

They are but broken lights of Thee, 

And Thou, Lord, art more than they." 

Tennyson. 

PREFACE. 

I should not have presumed to choose for any lectures of 
mine such a subject as that which I have tried to treat here. 
The subject was chosen for me by the Institution where the 
Lectures were delivered. Still less should I have presumed to 
print them of my own accord, knowing how fragmentary and 
crude they are. They were printed at the special request of 
my audience. Least of all, perhaps, ought I to have presumed 
to publish them, as I have done, at Cambridge, where any inac- 
curacy or sciolism (and that such defects exist in these pages, I 
cannot but fear) would be instantly detected, and severely cen- 
sured : but nevertheless, it seems to me that Cambridge was the 
fittest place in which they could see the light, because to Cam- 
bridge I mainly owe what little right method or sound thought 
may be found in them, or indeed, in anything which I have ever 
written. In the hey-day of youthful greediness and ambition, 
when the mind, dazzled by the vastness and variety of the uni- 
verse, must needs know everything, or rather know about every- 
thing, at once and on the spot, too many are apt, as I have been 
in past years, to complain of Cambridge studies as too dry and 
narrow : but as time teaches the student, year by year, what is 
really required for an understanding of the objects with which 
* Originally published in Cambridge, England. 



318 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

lie meets, lie begins to find that his University, in as far as he 
has really received her teaching into himself, has given him, in 
her criticism, her mathematics, above all, in Plato, something 
which all the popular knowledge, the lectures and institutions of 
the day, and even good books themselves, cannot give, a boon 
more precious than learning ; namely, the art of learning. That 
instead of casting into his lazy lap treasures which he would not 
have known how to use, she has taught him to mine for them 
himself; and has by her wise refusal to gratify his intellectual 
greediness, excited his hunger, only that he may be the stronger 
to hunt and till for his own subsistence; and thus the deeper 
he drinks, in after years, at fountains wisely forbidden to him 
wiiile he was a Cambridge student, and sees his old companions 
growing up into sound-headed and sound-hearted practical men, 
liberal and expansive, and yet with a firm standing ground for 
thought and action, he learns to complain less and less of Cam- 
bridge studies, and more and more of that conceit and haste of 
his own, which kept him from reaping the full advantage of her 
training. 

These Lectures, as I have said, are altogether crude and 
fragmentary, — how, indeed, could tliey be otherwise, dealing 
with so vast a subject, and so long a period of time ? They are 
meant neither as Essays nor as Orations, but simply as a col- 
lection of hints to those who may wish to work out the subject 
for themselves ; and, I trust, as giving some glimpses of a cen- 
tral idea, in the light of which the spiritual history of Alexandria, 
and perhaps of other countries also, may be seen to have in itself 
a coherence and organic method. 

I was of course compelled, by the circumstances under which 
these Lectures were delivered, to keep clear of all points which 
are commonly called " controversial." I cannot but feel that this 
was a gain, rather than a loss ; because it forced me, if I wished 
to give any interpretation at all of Alexandrian thought, any 
Theodicy at all of her fate, to refer to laws which I cannot but 
believe to be deeper, wider, more truly eternal than the points 
which cause most of our modern controversies, either theological 
or political ; laws which will, I cannot but believe also, reassert 
themselves, and have to be reasserted by all wise teachers, very 
soon indeed, and it may be under most novel embodiments, but 
without any change in their eternal spirit. 

For I may say, I hope, now, (what if said ten years ago would 
have only excited laughter,) that I cannot but subscribe to the 
opinion of the many wise men who believe that Europe, and 
England as an integral part thereof, is on the eve of a revolution, 
spiritual, and political as vast and awful as that which took place 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 319 

at the Eeformation ; and that, beneficial as that revolution will 
doubtless be to the destinies of mankind in general, it depends 
upon the wisdom and courage of each nation individually, whether 
that great deluge shall issue, as the Reformation did, in a fresh 
outgrowth of European nobleness and strength, or usher in, after 
pitiable confusions and sorrows, a second Byzantine age of stereo- 
typed effeminacy and imbecility. For I have as little sympathy 
with those who prate so loudly of the progress of the species, 
and the advent of I know-not-what Cockaigne of universal peace 
and plenty, as I have with those who believe, on the strength of 
" unfulfilled prophecy," the downfall of Christianity, and the end 
of the human race to be at hand. Nevertheless, one may well 
believe that prophecy will be fulfilled in this great crisis, as it 
is in every great crisis, although one be unable to conceive by 
what method of symbolism the drying up of the Euphrates can 
be twisted to signify the fall of Constantinople : and one can well 
believe that a day of judgment is at hand, in which for every 
nation and institution, the wheat will be sifted out and gathered 
into God's garner, for the use of future generations," and the 
chaff burnt up with that fire unquenchable which will try every 
man's work, without being of opinion that after a few more years 
are over, the great majority of the human race will be consigned 
hopelessly to never-ending torments. 

If prophecy be indeed a divine message to man ; if it be any- 
thing but a cabbala, useless either to the simple-minded or to 
the logical, intended only for the plaything of a few devout 
fancies, it must declare the unchangeable laws by which The 
unchangeable God is governing, and has always governed, the 
human race ; and therefore only by understanding what has 
happened, can we understand what will happen ; only by under- 
standing history, can we understand prophecy ; and that not 
merely by picking out — too often arbitrarily and unfairly — a 
few names and dates from the records of all the ages, but by 
trying to discover its organic laws, and the causes which pro- 
duce in nations, creeds, and systems health and disease, growth, 
change, decay, and death. If, in one small corner of this vast 
field, I shall have thrown a single ray of light upon these subjects, 
— if I shall have done anything in these pages towards illustrat- 
ing the pathology of a single people, I shall believe that I have 
done better service to the Catholic Faith and the Scriptures, 
than if I did really " know the times and the seasons, which the 
Father has kept in his own hand." For by the former act I 
may have helped to make some one man more prudent and brave 
to see and to do what God requires of him : by the latter I could 
only add to that paralysis of superstitious fear, which is already 



320 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

but too common among us, and but too likely to hinder us from 
doing our duty manfully against our real foes, whether it be 
pestilence at home or tyranny abroad. 

These last words lead me to another subject, on which I am 
bound to say a few words. I have, at the end of these Lectures, 
made some allusion to the present war. To have entered fur- 
ther into political questions would have been improper in the 
place where those Lectures were delivered : but I cannot refrain 
from saying here something more on this matter ; and that, first, 
because all political questions have their real root in moral and 
spiritual ones, and not (as too many fancy) in questions merely 
relating to the balance of power or commercial economy, and are 
(the world being under the guidance of a spiritual, and not a 
physical Being) finally decided on those spiritual grounds, and 
according to the just laws of the kingdom of God ; and, there- 
fore, the future political horoscope of the East depends entirely 
on the present spiritual state of its inhabitants, and of -us who 
have (and rightly) taken up their cause ; in short, on many of 
those questions on which I have touched in these Lectures : and 
next, because I feel bound, in justice to myself, to guard against 
any mistake about my meaning, or supposition that I consider 
the Turkish empire a righteous thing, or one likely to stand 
much longer on the face of God's earth. 

The Turkish empire, as it now exists, seems to me an alto- 
gether unrighteous and worthless thing. It stands no longer 
upon the assertion of the great truth of Islam, but on the merest 
brute force and oppression. It has long since lost the only ex- 
cuse which one race can have for holding another in subjection ; 
that which we have for taking on ourselves the tutelage of the 
Hindoos, and which Rome had for its tutelage of the Syrians 
and Egyptians ; namely, the governing with tolerable justice 
those who cannot govern themselves, and making them better 
and more prosperous people, by compelling them to submit to 
law. I do not know when this excuse is a sufficient one. God 
showed that it was so for several centuries in the case of the 
Romans ; God will show whether it is in the case of our Indian 
empire : but this I say, that the Turkish empire has not even 
that excuse to plead ; as is proved by the patent fact that the 
whole East, the very garden of the old world, has become a 
desert and a ruin under the upas-blight of their government. 

As for the regeneration of Turkey, it is a question whether 
the regeneration of any nation which has sunk, not into mere 
valiant savagery, but into effete and profligate luxury, is possible. 
Still more is it a question whether a regeneration can be effected, 
not by the rise of a new spiritual idea (as in the case of the 



ALEXANDKIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 321 

Koreish), but simply by more perfect material appliances, and 
commercial prudence. History gives no instance, it seems to 
me, of either case ; and if our attempt to regenerate Greece by 
freeing it has been an utter failure, much more, it seems to me, 
would any such attempt fail in the case of the Turkish race. 
For what can be done with a people which has lost the one 
great quality which was the tenure of its existence, its military 
skill ? Let any one read the accounts of the Turkish armies in 
the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when they 
were the tutors and models of all Europe in the art of war, and 
then consider the fact that those very armies require now to be 
officered by foreign adventurers, in order to make them capable 
of even keeping together, and let him ask himself seriously, 
whether such a fall can ever be recovered. When, in the age of 
Theodosius, and again in that of Justinian, the Roman armies 
had fallen into the same state ; when the Italian legions required 
to be led by Stilicho the Vandal, and the Byzantine by Belisar 
the Sclav and Narses the Persian, the end of all things was at 
hand, and came ; as it will come soon to Turkey. 

But if Turkey deserves to fall, and must fall, it must not fall 
by our treachery. Its sins will surely be avenged upon it : but 
wrong must not avenge wrong, or the penalty is only passed 
on from one sinner to another. Whatsoever element of good is 
left in the Turk, to that we must appeal as our only means, if 
not of saving him, still of helping him to a quiet euthanasia, and 
absorption into a worthier race of successors. He is said (I 
know not how truly) to have one virtue left ; that of faithfulness 
to his word. Only by showing him that we too abhor treachery 
and bad faith, can we either do him good, or take a safe standing- 
ground in our own peril. And this we have done ; and for this 
we shall be rewarded. But this is surely not all our duty. Even 
if we should be able to make the civil and religious freedom of 
the Eastern Christians the price of our assistance to the Mussul- 
man, the struggle will not be over ; for Russia will still be what 
she has always been, and the northern Anarch will be checked, 
only to return to the contest with fiercer lust of aggrandizement, 
to enact the part of a new Maceclon, against a new Greece, 
divided, not united, by the treacherous bond of that balance of 
power, which is but war under the guise of peace. Europe 
needs a holier and more spiritual, and therefore a stronger union, 
than can be given by armed neutralities, and the so-called cause 
of order. She needs such a bond as in the Elizabethan age 
united the free states of Europe against the Anarch of Spain, 
and delivered the western nations from a rising world-tyranny, 
which promised to be even more hideous than that elder one of 

14* 



322 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Pome. If, as then, England shall proclaim herself the champion 
of freedom by acts, and not by words and paper, she may, as 
she did then, defy the rulers of the darkness of this world, for 
the God of Light will be with her. But, as yet, it is impossible 
to look without sad forebodings upon the destiny of a war, begun 
upon the express understanding that evil shall be left triumphant 
throughout Europe, wheresoever that evil does not seem, to our 
own selfish shortsightedness, to threaten us with immediate dan- 
ger ; with promises, that under the hollow name of the Cause of 
Order — and that promise made by a revolutionary Anarch — the 
wrongs of Italy, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, shall remain unre- 
dressed, and that Prussia and Austria, two tyrannies, the one far 
more false and hypocritical, the other even more rotten than that 
of Turkey, shall, if they will but observe a hollow and uncertain 
neutrality, (for who can trust the liar and the oppressor ?) — be 
allowed not only to keep their ill-gotten spoils, but even now to 
play into the hands of our foe, by guarding his Polish frontier 
for him, and keeping down the victims of his cruelty, under pre- 
tence of keeping down those of their own. 

It is true, the alternative is an awful one; one from which 
statesmen and nations may well shrink : but it is a question, 
whether that alternative may not be forced upon us sooner or 
later, whether we must not from the first look it boldly in the 
face, as that which must be some day, and for which we must 
prepare, not cowardly, and with cries about God's wrath and 
judgments against us,- — which would be abject, were they not 
expressed in such second-hand stock-phrases as to make one 
altogether doubt their sincerity, but chivalrously, and with awful 
joy, as a noble calling, an honour put upon us by the God of 
Nations, who demands of us, as some small return for all his free 
bounties, that we should be, in this great crisis, the champions of 
Freedom and of Justice, which are the cause of God. At all 
events, we shall not escape our duty by being afraid of it ; we 
shall not escape our duty by inventing to ourselves some other 
duty, and calling it " Order." Elizabeth did so at first. She 
tried to keep the peace with Spain ; she shrank from injuring 
the cause of Order (then a nobler one than now, because it was 
the cause of Loyalty, and not merely of Mammon) by assisting 
the Scotch and the Netherlander : but her duty was forced upon 
her ; and she did it at last, cheerfully, boldly, utterly, like a 
hero ; she put herself at the head of the battle for the freedom 
of the world, and she conquered, for God was with her ; and so 
that seemingly most fearful of all England's perils, when the real 
meaning of it was seen, and God's will in it obeyed manfully, 
became the foundation of England's naval and colonial empire, 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 323 

and laid the foundation of all her future glories. So it was then, 
so it is now ; so it will be for ever : he who seeks to save his life 
will lose it : he who willingly throws away his life for the cause 
of mankind, which is the cause of God, the Father of mankind, 
he shall save it, and be rewarded a hundred-fold. That God 
may grant us, the children of the Elizabethan heroes, all wisdom 
to see our duty, and courage to do it, even to the death, should 
be our earnest prayer. Our statesmen have done wisely and 
well in refusing, in spite of hot-headed clamours, to appeal to 
the sword as long as there was any chance of a peaceful settle- 
ment even of a single evil. They are doing wisely and well 
now in declining to throw away the scabbard as long as there is 
hope that a determined front will awe the offender into submis- 
sion : but the day may come when the scabbard must be thrown 
away ; and God grant that they may have the courage to do it. 

It is reported that our rulers have said, that English diplomacy 
can no longer recognize " nationalities," but only existing " gov- 
ernments." God grant that they may see in time that the asser- 
tion of national life, as a spiritual and indefeasible existence, was 
for centuries the central idea of English policy ; the idea by 
faith in which she delivered first herself, and then the Protestant 
nations of the Continent, successively from the yokes of Rome, 
of Spain, of France ; and that they may reassert that most 
English of all truths again, let the apparent cost be what it may. 

It is true, that this end will not be attained without what is 
called nowadays " a destruction of human life." But we have 
yet to learn (at least if the doctrines which I have tried to illus- 
trate in this little book have any truth in them,) whether shot or 
shell has the power of taking away human life ; and to believe, 
if we believe our Bibles, that human life can only be destroyed 
by sin, and that all which is lost in battle is that animal life of 
which it is written, " Fear not those who can kill the body, and 
after that have no more that they can do : but I will forewarn 
you whom you shall fear ; him who, after he has killed, has 
power to destroy both body and soul in hell." Let a man fear 
him, the destroying devil, and fear therefore cowardice, dis- 
loyalty, selfishness, sluggishness, which are his works, and to be 
utterly afraid of which is to be truly brave. God grant that we 
of the clergy may remember this during the coming war, and 
instead of weakening the righteous courage and honour of our 
countrymen by instilling into them selfish and superstitious fears, 
and a theory of the future state which represents God, not as a 
saviour, but a tormentor, may boldly tell them that " He is 
not the God of the dead, but of the living; for all live unto 
him ; " and that he who renders up his animal life as a worthless 



324 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

tiling, in the cause of duty, commits his real and human life, his 
very soul and self, into the hands of a just and merciful Father, 
who has promised to leave no good deed unrewarded, and least 
of all that most noble deed, the dying like a man for the sake not 
merely of this land of England, but of the freedom and national 
life of half the world. 



LECTURE I. 

THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 



Before I begin to lecture upon the Physical and Metaphys- 
ical schools of Alexandria, it may be better, perhaps, to define 
the meaning of those two epithets. Physical, we shall all 
agree, means that which belongs to (pvag ; natura ; nature ; that 
which (bverat, nascitur, grows, by an organic life, and therefore 
decays again ; which has a beginning, and therefore, I presume, 
an end. And Metaphysical means that which we learn to think 
of after we think of nature ; that which is supernatural, in fact, 
having neither beginning nor end, imperishable, immovable, 
and eternal, which does not become, but always is. These, at 
least, are the wisest definitions of these two terms for us just 
now ; for they are those which were received by the whole Alex- 
andrian school, even by those commentators who say that Aris- 
totle, the inventor of the term Metaphysics, named his treatise 
so only on account of its following in philosophic sequence his 
book on Physics. 

But, according to these definitions, the whole history of Alex- 
andria might be to us, from one point of view, a physical school ; 
for Alexandria, its society and its philosophy, were born, and 
grew, and fed, and reached their vigour, and had their old age, 
their decay, their death, even as a plant or an animal has ; and 
after they were dead and dissolved, the atoms of them formed 
food for new creations, entered into new organizations, just as 
the atoms of a dead plant or animal might do. Was Alexandria 
then, from beginning to end, merely a natural and physical phe- 
nomenon ? 

It may have been. And yet we cannot deny that Alexandria 
was also a metaphysical phenomenon, vast and deep enough ; 
seeing that it held for some eighteen hundred years a population 
of several hundred thousand souls ; each of whom, at least accord- 
ing to the Alexandrian philosophy, stood in a very intimate rela- 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 325 

tion to those metaphysic things which are imperishable and im- 
movable and eternal, and indeed, contained them more or less, 
each man, woman, and child of them in themselves ; having wills, 
reasons, consciences, affections, relations to each other ; being 
parents, children, helpmates, bound together by laws concerning 
right and wrong, and numberless other unseen and spiritual rela- 
tions. 

Surely such a body was not merely natural : any more than 
any other nation, society, or scientific school, made up of men 
and of the spirits, thoughts, affections of men. It, like them, 
was surely spiritual ; and could be only living and healthy, in as 
far as it was in harmony with certain spiritual, unseen, and ever- 
lasting laws of God ; perhaps, as certain Alexandrian philoso- 
phers would have held, in as far as it was a pattern of that ideal 
constitution and polity after which man was created, the city of 
God which is eternal in the heavens. If so, may we not sus- 
pect of this Alexandria that it was its own fault if it became a 
merely physical phenomenon ; and that it stooped to become a 
part of nature, and took its place among the things which are 
born to die, only by breaking the law T which God had appointed 
for it ; so fulfilling, in its own case, St. Paul's great words, that 
death entered into the world by sin, and that sin is the trans- 
gression of the law ? 

Be that as it may, there must have been metaphysic enough 
to be learnt in that, or any city of three hundred thousand in- 
habitants, even though it had never contained lecture-room or 
philosophers chair, and had never heard the names of Aristotle 
and Plato. Metaphysic enough, indeed, to be learnt there, could 
we but enter into the heart of even the most brutish negro slave 
who ever was brought down the Nile out of the desert by Nu- 
bian merchants, to build piers and docks in whose commerce he 
did not share, temples whose worship he did not comprehend, 
libraries and theatres whose learning and civilization were to 
him as much a sealed book as they were to his countryman, and 
fellow-slave, and only friend, the ape. There was metaphysic 
enough in him truly, and things eternal and immutable : though 
his dark-skinned descendants were three hundred years in dis- 
covering the fact, and proving it satisfactorily to all mankind 
for ever. You must pardon me if I seem obscure ; I cannot 
help looking at the question with a somewhat Alexandrian eye, 
and talking of the poor negro dock-worker as certain Alexan- 
drian philosophers would have talked, of whom I shall have to 
speak hereafter. 

I should have been glad, therefore, had time permitted me, 
instead of confining myself strictly to what are now called " the 



326 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

physic and metaphysic schools" of Alexandria, to have tried as well 
as I could to make you understand how the whole vast phenom- 
enon grew up, and supported a peculiar life of its own, for fifteen 
hundred years and more, and was felt to be the third, perhaps the 
second city of the known world, and one so important to the 
great world-tyrant, the Caesar of Rome, that no Roman of dis- 
tinction was ever sent there as perfect, but the Alexandrian 
national vanity and pride of race was allowed to the last to pet 
itself by having its tyrant chosen from its own people. 

But, though this cannot be, we may find human elements 
enough in the schools of Alexandria, strictly so called, to interest 
us for a few evenings ; for these schools were schools of men ; what 
was discovered and taught was discovered and taught by men, and 
not by thinking-machines ; and whether they would have been 
inclined to confess it or not, their own personal characters, likes 
and dislikes, hopes and fears, strength and weakness, beliefs and 
disbeliefs, determined their metaphysics and their physics for 
them, quite enough to enable us to feel for them as men of like 
passions with ourselves ; and for that reason only, men whose 
thoughts and speculations are worthy of a moment's attention 
from us. For what is really interesting to man, save men, and 
God the Father of men ? 

In the year 331 b. c. one of the greatest intellects whose in- 
fluence the world has ever felt, saw, with his eagle glance, the 
unrivalled advantages of the spot which is now Alexandria ; and 
conceived the mighty project of making it the point of union of 
two, or rather of three worlds. In a new city, named after him- 
self, Europe, Asia, and Africa were to meet and to hold com- 
munion. A glance at the map will show you what an bn^aXbg yrjg, 
a centre of the world, this Alexandria is, and perhaps arouse in 
your minds, as it has often done in mine, the suspicion that it has 
not yet fulfilled its whole destiny, but may become at any time a 
prize for contending nations, or the centre of some world-wide em- 
pire to come. Communicating with Europe and the Levant by the 
Mediterranean, with India by the Red Sea, certain of boundless 
supplies of food from the desert-guarded valley of the Nile, to 
which it formed the only key, thus keeping all Egypt, as it were, 
for its own private farm, it was weak only on one side, that of 
Judaea. That small strip of fertile mountain land, containing in- 
numerable military positions from which an enemy might annoy 
Egypt, being, in fact, one natural chain of fortresses, was the key 
to Phoenicia and Syria. It was an eagle's eyrie by the side of a 
pen of fowls. It must not be left defenceless for a single year. Tyre 
and Gaza had been taken ; so no danger was to be apprehended 
from the seaboard : but to subdue the Judaean mountaineers, a race 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 327 

whose past sufferings had hardened them into a dogged fanati- 
cism of courage and endurance, would be a long and sanguinary 
task. It was better to make terms with them ; to employ them 
as friendly warders of their own mountain walls. Their very 
fanaticism and isolation made them sure allies. There was no 
fear of their fraternizing with Eastern invaders. If the country 
was left in their hands, they would hold it against all comers. 
Terms were made with them ; and, for several centuries, they 
fulfilled their trust. 

This I apprehend to be the explanation of that conciliatory 
policy of Alexander's toward the Jews, which was pursued steadily 
by the Ptolemies, by Pompey, and by the Pomans, as long as 
these same Jews continued to be endurable upon the face of the 
land. At least, we shall find the history of Alexandria and that 
of Judaea inextricably united for more than three hundred years. 

So arose, at the command of the great conqueror, a mighty 
city, around those two harbours, of which the western one only is 
now in use. The Pharos was then an island. It was connected 
with the mainland by a great mole, furnished with forts and 
drawbridges. On the ruins of that mole now stands the greater 
part of the modern city ; the vast site of the ancient one is a wil- 
derness. 

But Alexander was not destined to carry out his own magnifi- 
cent project. That was left for the general whom he most 
esteemed, and to whose personal prowess he had once owed his 
life ; a man than whom history knows few greater, Ptolemy, the 
son of Lagus. He was an adventurer, the son of an adventurer, 
his mother a cast-off concubine of Philip of Macedon. There 
were those who said that he was in reality a son of Philip 
himself. However, he rose at court, became a private friend of 
young Alexander, and at last his Somatophylax, some sort of 
Colonel of the Life Guards. And from thence he rose rapidly, 
till after his great master's death he found himself despot of 
Egypt. 

His face, as it appears on his coins, is of the loftiest and most 
Jove-like type of Greek beauty. There is a possibility about it, 
as about most old Greek faces, of boundless cunning ; a lofty 
irony too, and a contemptuousness, especially about the mouth, 
which puts one in mind of Geothe's expression : the face, alto- 
gether, of one who knew men too well to respect them. At 
least, he was a man of clear enough vision. He saw what was 
needed in those strange times, and he went straight to the thing 
which he saw. It was his wisdom which perceived that the huge 
amorphous empire of Alexander could not be kept together, and 
advised its partition among the generals, taking care to obtain 



328 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

himself the lion's share; not in size, indeed, but in capability. 
He saw, too, (what every man does not see,) that the only way 
to keep what he had got was to make it better, and not worse, 
than he found it. His first Egyptian act was to put to death 
Cleomenes, Alexander's lieutenant, w r ho had amassed vast treas- 
ures by extortion ; and who was, moreover, (for Ptolemy was a 
prudent man,) a dangerous partisan of his great enemy, Perdic- 
cas. We do not read that he refunded the treasures : but the 
Egyptians surnamed him Soter, the Saviour ; and on the whole 
he deserved the title. Instead of the wretched misrule and sla- 
very of the conquering Persian dynasty, they had at least law and 
order, reviving commerce, and a system of administration, we are 
told (I confess to speaking here quite at second hand,) especially 
adapted to the peculiar caste-society, and the religious prejudices 
of Egypt. But Ptolemy's political genius went beyond such 
merely material and Warburtonian care for the conservation of 
body and goods of his subjects. He effected with complete suc- 
cess a feat which has been attempted, before and since, by very 
many princes, and potentates, but has always, except in Ptole- 
my's case proved somewhat of a failure, namely, the making a 
new deity. Mythology in general was in a rusty state. The 
old Egyptian gods had grown in his dominions very unfashion- 
able, under the summary iconoclasm to which tjiey had been sub- 
jected by the Monotheist Persians, — the Puritans of the old 
world, as they have been well called. Indeed,*all the dolls— and 
the treasure of the dolls' temples too, had been carried off by 
Cambyses to Babylon. And as for the Greek gods, plilosophers 
had sublimed them away sadly during the last century : not to 
mention that Alexander's Macedonians, during their wanderings 
over the world, had probably become rather remiss in their 
religious exercises, and had probably given up mentioning the 
Unseen world, except for those hortatory purposes for which it 
used to be employed by Nelson's veterans. But, as Ptolemy 
felt, people (women especially) must have something wherein to 
believe. The " Religious Sentiment" in man must be satisfied. 
But, how to do it ? How to find a deity who would meet the 
aspirations of conquerors as well as conquered, — of his most 
irreligious Macedonians, as well as of his most religious Egyp- 
tians ? It was a great problem : but Ptolemy solved it. He 
seems to have taken the same method which Brindley the En- 
gineer used in his perplexities : for he went to bed. And there 
he had a dream : — Plow the foreign god Serapis, of Pontus, 
(somewhere near this present hapless Sinope,) appeared to him, 
and expressed his wish to come to Alexandria, and there try his 
influence on the Religious Sentiment. So Serapis was sent for, 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 329 

and came, — at least, the idol of him, and, accommodating person- 
age ! — he actually fitted. After he had been there awhile, he 
was found to be quite an old acquaintance — to be, in fact, the 
Greek Jove, and two or three other Greek gods, and also two or 
three Egyptian gods beside — indeed, to be no other than the bull 
Apis, after his death and deification. I can tell you no more. I 
never could find that anything more was known. You may see 
him among Greek and Roman statues as a young man, with a 
sort of high basket-shaped Persian turban on his head. But, at 
least, he was found so pleasant and accommodating a conscience- 
keeper, that he spread, with Isis, his newly-found mother, or wife, 
over the whole East, r ad even to Rome. The Consuls there 
[50 years b. c.J found the pair not too respectable, and pulled 
down their temples. But, so popular were they, in spite of their 
bad fame, that seven years after, the Triumvirs had to build the 
temples up again elsewhere ; and from that time forth, Isis and 
Serapis, in spite, poor t flings, of much persecution, were the fash- 
ion abie deities of the Roman world. Surely this Ptolemy was a 
man of genius ! 

But Ptolemy had even more important work to do than making 
gods. He had to make men ; for he had few or none ready 
made ^mong his old veterans from Issus and Arbela. He had 
no hereditary aristocracy : and he wanted none. No aristocracy 
of wealth \ that might grow of itself, only too fast for his des- 
potic power. But as a despot, he must have a knot of men 
round him who would do his work. And here came out his deep 
insight into fact. It had not escaped that man, what was the 
secret of Greek supremacy. How had he* come there ? How 
had his great master conquered half the world ? How had the 
little semibarbarous mountain tribe up there in Pella, risen under 
Philip to be the master-race of the globe ? How, indeed, had 
Xenophon and his Ten Thousand, how had the handfuls of Sala- 
mis and Marathon, held out triumphantly century after century, 
against the vast weight of the barbarian ? The simple answer 
was, — Because the Greek has mind, the barbarian mere brute 
force. Because mind is the lord of matter : because the Greek 
being the cultivated man, is the only true man ; the rest are 
j3up(3apoL, mere things, clods, tools for the wise Greeks' use, in spite 
of all their material phantom-strength of elephants, and treasures, 
and tributaries by the million. Mind was the secret of Greek 
power; and for that Ptolemy would work. He would have an 
aristocracy of intellect ; he would gather round him the wise men 
of the world (glad enough most of them to leave that miserable 
Greece, where every man's life was in his hand from hour to 
hour,) and he would develop to its highest, the conception of 



330 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Philip, when he made Aristotle the tutor of his son Alexander. 
The consequences of that attempt were written in letters of blood, 
over half the world ; Ptolemy would attempt it once more, with 
gentler results. For though he fought long, and often, and well, 
as Despot of Egypt, no less than as general of Alexander, he 
was not at heart a man of blood, and made peace the end of all 
his wars. 

So he begins. Aristotle is gone : but in Aristotle's place Phi- 
letas the sweet singer of Cos, and Zenodotus the grammarian of 
Ephesus, shall educate his favourite son, and he will have a lite- 
rary court, and a literary age. Demetrius Phalereus, the Admi- 
rable Crichton of his time, the last of Attic orators, statesman, 
philosopher, poet, warrior, and each of them in the most graceful, 
insinuating, courtly way, migrates to Alexandria, after having 
had the three hundred and sixty statues, which the Athenians 
had too hastily erected to his honour, as hastily pulled down 
again. Here was a prize for Ptolemy ! The charming man 
became his bosom friend and fellow, even revised the laws of his 
kingdom, and fired him, if report says true, with a mighty 
thought — no less a one than the great public Library of Alex- 
andria ; the first such institution, it is said, which the world had 
ever seen. 

So a library is begun by Soter, and organized and completed 
by Philadelphus ; or rather two libraries, for while one part was 
kept at the Serapeium, that vast temple on the inland rising 
ground, of which, as far as we can discover, Pompeys Pillar 
alone remains, one column out of four hundred, the rest was in the 
Brucheion adjoining the Palace and the Museum. Philadelphus 
buys Aristotle's collection to add to the stock, and Euergetes 
cheats the Athenians out of the original MSS. of iEschylus, 
Sophocles, and Euripides, and adds largely to it by more honest 
methods. Eumenes, King of Pergamus in Asia Minor, fired 
with emulation, commences a similar collection, and is so success- 
ful, that the reigning Ptolemy has to cut off his rival's supplies 
by prohibiting the exportation of papyrus ; and the Pergamenian 
books are henceforth transcribed on parchment, parchemin, Per- 
gamene, which thus has its name to this day, from Pergamus. 
That collection, too, found its way at last to Alexandria. For 
Anthony having become possessor of it by right of the stronger, 
gave it to Cleopatra ; and it remained at Alexandria for seven 
hundred years. But we must not anticipate events. 

Then there must be besides a Mouseion, a Temple of the. 
Muses, with all due appliances, in a vast building adjoining the 
palace itself, under the very wing of royalty ; and it must have 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS, 331 

porticoes, wherein sages may converse ; lecture-room 9, where 
they may display themselves at their will to their rapt scholars, 
each like a turkey-cock before his brood ; and a large dining- 
hall, where they may enjoy themselves in moderation, as befits 
sages, not without puns and repartees, epigrams, anagrams, and 
Attic salt, to be fatal, alas, to poor Diodorus the dialectician. 
For Stilpo, prince of sophists, having silenced him by some quib- 
bling puzzle of logic, Ptolemy surnamed him Chronos, the Slow. 
Poor Diodorus went home, took pen and ink, wrote a treatise on 
the awful nothing, and died in despair, leaving five " dialectical 
daughters " behind him, to be thorns in the sides of some five 
hapless men of Macedonia, as " emancipated women ; " a class 
but too common in the later days of Greece, as they will always 
be, perhaps, in civilizations which are decaying and crumbling to 
pieces, leaving their members to seek in bewilderment what they 
are, and what bonds connect them with their fellow-beings. But 
to return ; funds shall be provided for the Museum from the 
treasury ; a priest of rank appointed by royalty, shall be curator ; 
botanical and zoological gardens shall be attached ; collections of 
wonders made. In all things the presiding genius of Aristotle 
shall be worshipped ; for these, like Alexander, were his pupils. 
Had he not mapped out all heaven and earth, things seen and 
unseen, with his entelechies, and energies, and dunameis, and 
put every created and uncreated thing henceforth into its proper 
place, from the ascidians and polypes of the sea to the virtues 
and the vices, — yea, to that Great Deity and Prime Cause, 
(which indeed was all things,) Noesis Noeseon, " the Thought 
of Thoughts," whom he discovered by irrefragable processes of 
logic, and in whom the philosophers believe privately, leaving 
Serapis to the women and the sailors ? All they had to do was 
to follow in his steps ; to take each of them a branch of science 
or literature, or as many branches as one man conveniently can ; 
and working them out on the approved methods, end in a few 
years, as Alexander did, by weeping on the utmost shore of crea- 
tion that there are no more worlds left to conquer. 

Alas ! the Muses are shy and wild ; and though they will 
haunt, like skylarks, on the bleakest northern moor as cheerfully 
as on the sunny hills of Greece, and rise thence singing into the 
heaven of heavens, jet they are hard to tempt into a gilded cage, 
however amusingly made and plentifully stored with comforts. 
Royal societies, associations of savans, and the like, are good for 
many things, but not for the breeding of art and genius : for they 
are things which cannot be bred. Such institutions are excellent 
for physical science, when, as among us now, physical science is 
going on the right method : but where, as in Alexandria, it was 



332 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

going on an utterly wrong method, they stereotype the errors of 
the age, and invest them with the prestige of authority, and pro- 
duce mere Sorbonnes, and schools of pedants. To literature, 
too, they do some good, that is, in a literary age, — an age of 
reflection rather than of production, of antiquarian research, 
criticism, imitation, when book-making has become an easy and 
respectable pursuit for the many who cannot dig, and are ashamed 
to beg. And yet, by adding that same prestige of authority, 
not to mention of good society and Court favour, to the popular 
mania for literature, they help on the growing evil, and increase 
the multitude of prophets who prophesy out of their own heart 
and have seen nothing. 

And this was, it must be said, the outcome of all the Ptolemsean 
appliances. 

In Physics they did little. In Art nothing. In Metaphysics 
less than nothing. 

We will first examine, as the more pleasant spectacle of the 
two, that branch of thought in which some progress was really 
made, and in which the Ptolemaic schools helped forward the 
development of men who have become world-famous, and will 
remain so, I suppose, until the end of time. 

Four names at once attract us : Euclid, Aristarchus, Eratos- 
thenes, Hipparchus. Archimedes, also, should be included in 
the list, for he was a pupil of the Alexandrian school, having 
studied (if Proclus is to be trusted) in Egypt, under Conon the 
Samian, during the reigns of two Ptolemies, Philadelphus and 
Euergetes. 

Of Euclid, as the founder (according to Proclus) of the Alex- 
andrian Mathematical school, I must of course speak first. Those 
who wish to attain to a juster conception of the man and his work 
than they can do from any other source, will do well to read Pro- 
fessor De Morgan's admirable article on him in Smith's Classical 
Dictionary ; which includes, also, a valuable little sketch of the 
rise of Geometric science, from Pythagoras and Plato, of whose 
school Euclid was, to the great master himself. 

I shall confine myself to one observation on Euclid's genius, 
and on the immense influence which it exerted on after genera- 
tions. It seems to me, speaking under correction, that it exerted 
this, because it was so complete a type of the general tendency 
of the Greek mind, deductive, rather than inductive ; of unrivalled 
subtlety in obtaining results from principles, and results again 
from them, ad infinitum : deficient in that sturdy moral patience 
which is required for the examination of facts, and which has 
made Britain at once a land of practical craftsmen, and of earn- 
est scientific discoverers. 



ALEXANDRIA AXD HER SCHOOLS. 

Volatile, restless, "always children longing for something new," 
as the Egyptian priest said of them, they were too ready to be- 
lieve that they had attained laws, and then tired with their toy, 
throw away those hastily assumed laws, and wander off in search 
of others. Gifted, beyond all the sons of men, with the most 
exquisite perception of form, both physical and metaphysical, 
they could become geometers and logicians, as they became sculp- 
tors and artists ; beyond that they could hardly rise. They were 
conscious of their power to build ; and it made them ashamed to 
dig.^ 

Four men only among them seem, as far as I can judge, to 
have had a great inductive power. Socrates and Plato in Meta- 
physics ; Archimedes and Hipparchus in Physics. But these 
men ran so far counter to the national genius, that their exam- 
ples were not followed. As you will hear presently, the discov- 
eries of Archimedes and Hipparchus were allowed to remain 
where they were for centuries. The Dialectic of Plato and 
Socrates was degraded into a mere art for making any thing 
appear alternately true and false, and among the Megaric school, 
for undermining the ground of all science, and paving the way 
for skepticism, by denying the natural world to be the object 
of certain knowledge. The only element of Plato's thought 
to which they clung was, as we shall find from the Neoplaton- 
ists, his physical speculations ; in which, deserting his inductive 
method, he has fallen below himself into the popular cacoethes, 
and Pythagorean deductive dreams about the mysterious powers 
of number, and of the regular solids. 

Such a people, when they took to studying physical science, 
would be, and in fact were, incapable- -of Chemistry, Geognosy, 
Comparative Anatomy, or any of that noble choir of sister 
sciences, which are now building up the material as well as the 
intellectual glory of Britain. 

To Astronomy, on the other hand, the pupils of Euclid turned 
naturally, as to the science which required the greatest amount 
of their favourite geometry : but even that they were content to 
let pass from its inductive to its deductive stage, — not as we have 
done now, after two centuries of inductive search for the true 
laws, and their final discovery by Kepler and Newton : but as 
soon as Hipparchus had propounded any theory which would do 
instead of the true laws, content there to stop their experiments, 
and return to their favourite work of commenting, deducing, 
spinning notion out of notion, ad infinitum. 

Still, they were not all of this temper. Had they been, they 
would have discovered, not merely a little, but absolutely noth- 
ing. For after all, if we will consider, induction being the right 



334 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

path to knowledge, every man, whether he knows it or not, uses 
induction, more or less, by the mere fact of his having a human 
reason, and knowing any thing at all ; as M. Jourdain talked 
prose all his life without being aware of it. 

Aristarchus is principally famous for his attempt to discover 
the distance of the sun as compared with that of the moon. His 
method was ingenious enough, but too rough for success, as it 
depended principally on the belief that the line bounding the 
bright part of the moon was an exact straight line. The result 
was of course erroneous. He concluded that the sun was eigh- 
teen times as far as the moon, and not, as we now know, four 
hundred ; but his conclusion, like his conception of the vast ex- 
tent of the sphere of the fixed stars, was far enough in advance 
of the popular doctrine to subject him, according to Plutarch, to 
a charge of impiety. 

Eratosthenes, again, contributed his mite to the treasure of 
human science, — his one mite ; and yet by that he is better 
known than by all the volumes which he seems to have poured 
out, on Ethics, Chronology, Criticism on the old Attic Comedy, 
and what not, spun out of his weary brain during a long life of 
research and meditation. They have all perished,— like ninety- 
nine hundredths of the labours of that great literary age ; and 
perhaps the world is no poorer for the loss. But one thing, 
which he attempted on a sound and practical philosophic method, 
stands, and will stand for ever. And after all, is not that enough 
to have lived for ? to have found out one true thing, and, there- 
fore, one imperishable thing, in one's life. If each one of us 
could but say when he died, " This one thing I have found out ; 
this one thing I have proved to be possible ; this one eternal 
fact I have rescued from Hela, the realm of the formless and 
unknown." How rich one such generation might make the world 
for ever ! 

But such is not the appointed method. The finders are few 
and far between : because the true seekers are few and far be- 
tween ; and a whole generation has often nothing to show for its 
existence but one solitary gem, which some one man, — often 
unnoticed in his time, — has picked up for them, and so given 
them " a local habitation and a name." 

Eratosthenes had heard that in Syene, in Upper Egypt, deep 
wells were enlightened to the bottom on the day of the summer 
solstice, and that vertical objects cast no shadows. 

He had before suggested, as is supposed, to Ptolemy Euer- 
getes, to make him the two great copper armillse, or circles for 
determining the equinox, which stood for centuries in " that 
which is called the Square Porch," — probably somewhere in the 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 335 

Museum. By these he had calculated the obliquity of the 
ecliptic, closely enough to serve for a thousand years after. That 
was one work done. But what had the Syene shadows to do 
with that ? Syene must be under that ecliptic. On the edge of 
it. In short, just under the tropic. Now he had ascertained 
exactly the latitude of one place on the earth's surface. He had 
his known point from whence to start on a world-journey, and he 
would use it; he would calculate the' circumference of the earth, 
— and he did it. By observations made at Alexandria, he ascer- 
tained its latitude compared with that of Syene ; and so ascer- 
tained what proportion to the whole circumference was borne by 
the five thousand stadia between Alexandria and Syene. He 
fell into an error, by supposing Alexandria and Syene to be 
under the same meridians of longitude : but that did not prevent 
his arriving at a fair rough result of two hundred and fifty-two 
thousand stadia, — thirty-one thousand iive hundred Roman miles ; 
considerably too much ; but still, before him, I suppose, none 
knew whether it was ten thousand or ten millions. The right 
method having once been found, nothing remained but to employ 
it more accurately. 

One other great merit of Eratosthenes is, that he first raised 
Geography to the rank of a science. His Geographica were an 
organic collection, the first the world had ever seen, of all the 
travels and books of earth-description heaped together in the 
Great Library, of which he was for many ^ears the keeper. He 
began with a geognostic book, touched on the traces of Cataclysms 
and Change, visible on the earth's surface ; followed by two 
books, one a mathematic book, the other on political geography, 

and completed by a map — which one would like to see : but 

not a trace of all remains, but a few quoted fragments — 

" We are such stuff 
As dreams are made of." 

But if Eratosthenes had hold of eternal fact and law on one 
point, there was a contemporary who had hold of it in more than 
one. I mean Archimedes ; of whom, as I have said, we must 
speak as of an Alexandrian. It was as a mechanician, rather 
than as an astronomer, that he gained his reputation. The 
stories of his Hydraulic Screw, the Great Ship which he built 
for Hiero, and launched by means of machinery, his crane, his 
war-engines, above all his somewhat mythical arrangement of 
mirrors, by which he set fire to ships in the harbour — all these, 
like the story of his detecting the alloy in Hiero's crown, while 
he himself was in the bath, and running home undressed shout- 
ing evpqua — all these are schoolboy's tales. To the thoughtful 



336 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

person it is the method of the man which constitutes his real 
greatness, that power of insight by which he solved the two 
great problems of the nature of the lever and of hydrostatic 
pressure, which form the basis of all static and hydrostatic 
science to this day. And yet on that very question of the lever 
the great mind of Aristotle babbles — neither sees the thing itself, 
nor the way towards seeing it. And since Archimedes spoke, 
the thing seems self-evident to every schoolboy. There is some- 
thing to me very solemn in such a fact as this. It brings us 
down to some of the very deepest questions of metaphysic. This 
mental insight of which we boast so much, what is it ? Is it 
altogether a process of our own brain and will ? If it be, why 
have so few the power, even among men of power, and they so 
seldom ? If brain alone were what was wanted, what could not 
Aristotle have discovered? Or is it that no man can see a thing 
unless God shows it him ? Is it that in each separate act of in- 
duction, that mysterious and transcendental process which can- 
not, let logicians try as they will, be expressed by any merely 
logical formula, Aristotelian or other — is it, I say, that in each 
separate act of induction we do not find the law, but the law is 
shown to us, by Him who made the law ? Bacon thought so. 
Of that you may find clear proof in his writings. May not Ba- 
c|n be right ? May it not be true that God does in science, as 
Well as in ethics, hide things from the wise and prudent, from 
the proud, complete, ^self-contained systematizer like Aristotle, 
who must needs explain all things in heaven and earth by his 
own formulae, and his entelechies and energies, and the rest of 
the notions which he has made for himself out of his own brain, 
and then pack each thing away in its proper niche in his great 
cloud-universe of conceptions ? Is it that God hides things from 
such men many a time, and reveals them to babes, to gentle, 
affectionate, simple-hearted men, such as we know Archimedes 
to have been, who do not try to give an explanation for a fact, 
but feel how awful and divine it is, and wrestle reverently and 
steadfastly with it, as Jacob with the Angel, and will not let it 
go, until it bless them ? Sure I am, from what I have seen of 
scientific men, that there is an intimate connection between the 
health of the moral faculties and the health of the inductive 
ones ; and that the proud, self-conceited, and passionate man 
will see nothing : perhaps because nothing will be shown him. 

But we must leave Archimedes for a man not perhaps so well 
known, but to whom we owe as much as to the great Syracu- 
san ; — Hipparchus the astronomer. To his case much which I 
have just said applies. In him astronomic science seemed to 
awaken suddenly to a true inductive method, and after him to 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 337 

fall into its old slumber for three hundred years. In the mean- 
time Timocharis, Aristyllus, and Conon had each added their 
mites to the discoveries of Eratosthenes : but to Hipparehus we 
owe that theory of the heavens, commonly called the Ptolemaic 
system, which starting from the assumption that the earth was 
the centre of the universe, attempted to explain the motions of 
the heavenly bodies by a complex system of supposed eccentrics 
and epicyles. This has of course now vanished before modern 
discoveries. But its value as a scientific attempt lies in this : 
that the method being a correct one, correct results were ob- 
tained, though starting from a false assumption; and Hipparehus 
and his successors were enabled by it to calculate and predict the 
changes of the heavens, in spite of their clumsy instruments, 
with almost as much accuracy as we do now. 

For the purpose of working out this theory he required a 
science of trigonometry, plane and spherical : and this he ac- 
cordingly seems to have invented. To him also we owe the dis- 
covery of that vast gradual change in the position of the fixed 
stars, in fact, of the whole celestial system, now known by the 
name of the precession of the equinoxes ; the first great catalogue 
of fixed stars, to the number of 1080 ; attempts to ascertain 
whether the length of years and days were constant ; with which, 
with his characteristic love of truth, he seems to have been hardly 
satisfied. He too invented the planisphere, or mode of repre- 
senting the starry heavens upon a plane, and is the father of true 
geography, having formed the happy notion of mapping out 
the earth, as well as the heavens, by degrees of latitude and 
longitude. 

Strange it is, and somewhat sad, that we should know noth- 
ing of this great man, should be hardly able to distinguish him 
from others of the same name, but through the works of a com- 
mentator, who wrote and observed in Alexandria 300 years after, 
during the age of the Antonines. I mean, of course, the famous 
Ptolemy, whose name so long bore the honour of that system 
which really belonged to Hipparehus. 

This single fact speaks volumes for the real weakness of the 
great artificial school of literature and science founded by the 
kings of Egypt. From the father of Astronomy, as Delambre 
calls him, to Ptolemy, the first man who seems really to have 
appreciated him, we have not a discovery, hardly an observation 
or a name to fill the gap. Physical sages there were ; but they were 
geometers and mathematicians, rather than astronomic observers 
and inquirers. And in spite of all the huge appliances and ad- 
vantages of that great Museum, its inhabitants were content, in 
physical science, as in all other branches of thought, to comment, 
15 



338 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

to expound, to do every thing but open their eyes and observe 
facts, and learn from them, as the predecessors whom they pre- 
tended to honour had done. But so it is always. A genius, 
an original man appears. He puts himself boldly in contact 
with facts, asks them what they mean, and writes down their 
answer for the world's use. And then his disciples must needs 
form a school, and a system ; and fancy that they do honour 
to their master, by refusing to follow in his steps ; by making 
his book a fixed dogmatic canon ; attaching to it some magical 
infallibility ; declaring the very lie which he disproved by his 
whole existence, that discovery is henceforth impossible, and the 
sum of knowledge complete : instead of going on to discover as 
he discovered before them, and by following his method, show 
that they honour him, not in the letter, but in spirit and in 
truth. 

For this, if you will consider, is the true meaning of that great 
command, " Honour thy father and mother, that thy days may 
be long in the land." On reverence for the authority of by-gone 
generations, depends the permanence of every form of thought or 
belief, as much as of all social, national, and family life : but on 
reverence of the spirit, not merely of the letter ; of the methods 
of our ancestors, not merely of their conclusions. Ay, and we 
shall not be able to preserve their conclusions, not even to un- 
derstand them ; they will die away on our lips into skeleton 
notions, and soulless phrases, unless we see that the greatness of 
the mighty dead has always consisted in this, that they were 
seekers, improvers, inventors, endued with that divine power and 
right of discovery which has been bestowed on us, even as on 
them ; unless we become such men as they were, and go on to 
cultivate and develop the precious heritage which they have be- 
queathed to us, instead of hiding their talent in a napkin and 
burying it in the earth ; making their greatness an excuse for 
our own littleness, their industry for our laziness, their faith for 
our despair ; and prating about the old paths, while we forget 
that paths were made that men might walk in them, and not 
stand still, and try in vain to stop the way. 

It may be said certainly, as an excuse for these Alexandrian 
Greeks, that they were a people in a state of old age and decay ; 
and that they only exhibited the common and natural faults of 
old age. For as with individuals, so with races, nations, societies, 
schools of thought ; youth is the time of free fancy and poetry ; 
manhood of calm and strong induction : old age of deduction, 
when men settle down upon their lees, and content themselves 
with reaffirming and verifying the conclusions of their earlier 
years, and too often, alas ! with denying and anathematizing all 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 339 

conclusions which have been arrived at since their own meridian. 
It is sad : but it is patent and common. It is sad to think that 
the day may come to each of us, when we shall have ceased to 
hope for discovery and for progress ; when a thing will seem a 
priori false to us, simply because it is new ; and we shall be 
saying querulously to the Divine Light which lightens every 
man who comes into the world, " Hitherto shalt thou come, and 
no further. Thou hast taught men enough ; yea, rather, thou 
hast exhausted thine own infinitude, and hast no more to teach 
them." — Surely such a temper is to be fought against, prayed 
against, both in ourselves, and in the generation in which we 
live. Surely there is no reason why such a temper should over- 
take old age. There may be reason enough, " in the nature of 
things." For that which is of nature is born only to decay and 
die. But in man there is more than dying nature ; there is 
spirit, and a capability of spiritual and everlasting life, which 
renews its youth like the eagle's, and goes on from strength to 
strength, and which if it have its autumns and its winters, has no 
less its ever-recurring springs and summers ; if it has its Sab- 
baths, finds in them only rest and refreshment for coming labour. 
And why not in nations, societies, scientific schools ? These too 
are not merely natural : they are spiritual, and are only living 
and healthy in as far as they are in harmony with spiritual, un- 
seen, and everlasting laws of God. May not they, too, have a 
capability of everlasting life, as long as they obey those laws in 
faith, and patience, and humility ? We cannot deny the analogy 
between the individual man, and these societies of men. We 
cannot, at least, deny the analogy between them in growth, decay, 
and death. May we not have hope that it holds good also for 
that which can never die; and that if they do die, as this old Greek 
society did, it is by no brute natural necessity, but by their own un- 
faithfulness to that which they knew, to that which they ought to 
have known ? It is always more hopeful, always, as I think, more 
philosophic, to throw the blame of failure on man, on ourselves, 
rather than on God, and the perfect law of his universe. At least 
let us be sure for ourselves, that such an old age as befell this 
Greek society, as befalls many a man nowadays, need not be our 
lot. Let us be sure that earth shows no fairer sight than the old 
man, whose worn-out brain and nerves make it painful, and per- 
haps impossible to produce fresh thought himself: but who can 
jet welcome smilingly and joyfully the fresh thoughts of others ; 
who keeps unwearied his faith in God's government of the uni- 
verse, in God's continual education of the human race; who 
draws around him the young and the sanguine, not merely to 
check their rashness by his wise cautions, but to inspirit their 



340 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

sloth by the memories of his own past victories ; who hands over, 
without envy or repining, the lamp of truth to younger runners 
than himself, and sits contented by, bidding the new generation 
God speed along the paths untrodden by him, but seen afar off 
by faith. A few such old persons have I seen, both men and 
women ; in whom the young heart beat pure and fresh, beneath 
the cautious and practised brain of age, and gray hairs which 
were indeed a crown of glory. A few such have I seen ; and 
from them I seemed to learn what was the likeness of our Father 
who is in heaven. To such an old age may he bring you and 
me, and all for whom we are bound to pray. 



LECTUEE II. 

THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 

[ Continued.'] 

I said in my first Lecture, that even if royal influence be 
profitable for the prosecution of physical science, it cannot be 
profitable for art. It can only produce a literary age, as it did 
in the Ptolemaic era ; a generation of innumerable court-poets, 
artificial epigrammatists, artificial idyllists, artificial dramatists 
and epicists ; above all, a generation of critics. Or rather shall 
we say, that the dynasty was not the cause of a literary age, 
but only its correlative ? That when the old Greeks lost the 
power of being free, of being anything but the slaves of oriental 
despots, as the Ptolemies in reality were, they lost also the 
power of producing true works of art ; because they had lost 
that youthful vigour of mind, from which both art and freedom 
sprang ? Let the case be as it will, Alexandrian literature need 
not detain us long — though, alas ! it has detained every boy who 
ever trembled over his Greek grammar, for many a weary year ; 
and I cannot help suspecting, has been the main cause that so 
many young men who have spent seven years in learning Greek, 
know nothing about it at the end of the seven. For I must say, 
that as far as we can see, these Alexandrian pedants were 
thorough pedants ; very polished and learned gentlemen, no 
doubt, and, like Callimachus the pets of princes : but after all, 
men who thought that they could make up for not writing great 
works themselves, by showing, with careful analysis and com- 
mentation, how men used to write them of old ; or rather how 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 341 

they fancied men used to write them ; for, consider, if they had 
really known how the thing was done, they must needs have 
been able to do it themselves. Thus Callimachus, the favourite of 
Ptolemy Philadelphia, and librarian of his Museum, is the most 
distinguished grammarian, critic, and poet of his day, and has 
for pupils Eratosthenes, Apollonius Phodius, Aristophanes of 
Byzantium, and a goodly list more. He is an Encyclopaedia in 
himself. There is nothing the man does not know, or probably, 
if we spoke more correctly, nothing he does not know about. He 
w T rites on history, on the museum, on barbarous names, on the 
wonders of the world, on public games, on colonization, on winds, 
on birds, on the rivers of the world, and — ominous subject — a 
sort of comprehensive history of Greek literature, with a careful 
classification of all authors, each under his own heading. Greek 
literature was rather in the sere and yellow leaf, be sure, when 
men thought of writing that sort of thing about it. But still, he 
is an encyclopaedic man, and moreover, a poet. He writes an 
epic, " Aitia," in four books, on the causes of the myths, religi- 
ous ceremonies, and so forth — an ominous sign, for the myths, 
also, and the belief in them ; also a Hecate, Galataea, Glaucus — 
four epics, besides comedies, tragedies, iambics, choriambics, 
elegies, hymns, epigrams seventy-three — and of these last alone 
can we say that they are in any degree readable ; and they are 
courtly, far-fetched, neat, and that is all. Six hymns remain, 
and a few fragments of fche elegies : but the most famous elegy, 
on Berenice's hair is preserved to us only in a Latin paraphrase 
of Catullus. It is curious, as the earliest instance we have of 
genuinely ungenuine Court poetry, and of the complimentary lie 
which does not even pretend to be true ; the flattery which will 
not take the trouble to prevent your seeing that it is laughing 
in your face. 

Berenice the queen, on Ptolemy's departure to the wars, vows 
her beautiful tresses to her favourite goddess, as the price of her 
husband's safe return ; and duly pays her vow. The hair is 
hung up in the temple : in a day or two after it has vanished. 
Dire is the wrath of Ptolemy, the consternation of the priests, 
the scandal to religion : when Conon the court-astronomer, luck- 
ily searching the heavens, finds the missing tresses in an utterly 
unexpected place, — as a new constellation of stars, which to this 
day bears the title of Coma Berenices. It is so convenient to 
believe the fact, that everybody believes it accordingly ; and 
Callimachus writes an elegy thereon in which the constellified, 
or indeed deified tresses, address in most melodious and highly 
finished Greek, bedizened with concetto on concetto, that fair 
and sacred head whereon they grew, to be shorn from which is 



342 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

so dire a sorrow, that apotheosis itself can hardly reconcile them 
to the parting: 

Worthy — was not all this, of the descendants of the men who 
fought at Marathon and Thermopylae ? The old Greek civiliza- 
tion was rotting swiftly down ; while a fire of God was preparing, 
slowly and dimly, in that unnoticed Italian town of Rome, which 
was destined to burn up that dead world, and all its works. 

Callimachus's hymns, those may read who list. They are 
highly finished enough ; the work of a man who knew thoroughly 
what sort of article he intended to make, and what were the most 
approved methods of making it. Curious and cumbrous mytho- 
logical lore comes out in every other line. The smartness, the 
fine epithets, the recondite conceits, the bits of effect, are beyond 
all praise ; but as for- one spark of life, of poetry, of real belief, 
you will find none ; not even in that famous Lavacrum Palladis 
which Angelo Poliziano thought worth translating into Latin ele- 
giacs, about the same time that the learned Florentine, Antonio 
Maria Salviano, found Berenice's hair worthy to be paraphrased 
back from Catullus's Latin into Greek, to give the world some 
faint notion of the inestimable and incomparable original. They 
must have had much time on their hands. But at the Revival 
of Letters, as was to be expected, all works of the ancients, good 
and bad, were devoured alike with youthful eagerness by the 
Medicis and. the Popes ; and it was not, we shall see, for more 
than one century after, that men's tastes got sufficiently matured 
to distinguish between Callimachus and the Homeric hymns, or 
between Plato and Proclus. Yet Callimachus and his fellows 
had an effect on the world. His writings, as well as those of 
Philetas, were the model on which Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus, 
formed themselves. 

And so I leave him, with two hints. If any one wishes to see 
the justice of my censure, let him read one of the Alexandrian 
hymns, and immediately after it, one of those glorious old Homeric 
hymns to the very same deities ; let him contrast the insincere 
and fulsome idolatry of Callimachus, with the reverent, simple 
and maniful anthropomorphism of the Homerist, — and let him 
form his own judgment. 

The other hint is this. If Callimachus, the founder of Alex- 
andrian literature, be such as he is, what are his pupils likely to 
become, at least without some infusion of healthier blood, such as 
in the case of his Roman imitators produced a new and not alto- 
gether ignoble school ? 

Of Lycophron, the fellow-grammarian and Poet of Callima- 
chus, we have nothing left but the Cassandra, a long iambic poem, 
stuffed with traditionary learning, and so obscure, that it obtained 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 343 

for him the surname of gkotelvoc, the dark one. I have tried in 
vain to read it : you, if you will, may do the same. 

Philetas, the remaining member of the Alexandrian Triad, 
seems to have been a more simple, genial, and graceful spirit 
than the other two, to whom he was accordingly esteemed infe- 
rior. Only a few fragments are left: but he was not altogether 
without his influence, for he was, as I just said, one of the models 
on which Propertius and Ovid formed themselves ; and some, in- 
deed, call him the Father of the Latin elegy, with its terseness, 
grace, and clear epigrammatic form of thought, and, therefore, in 
a great degree, of our modern eighteenth century poets ; not a 
useless excellence, seeing that it is, on the whole, good for him 
who writes to see clearly what he wants to say, and to be able to 
make his readers see it clearly also. And yet one natural strain 
is heard amid all this artificial jingle ; that of Theocritus. It is 
not altogether Alexandrian. Its sweetest notes were learnt amid 
the chestnut groves and orchards, the volcanic glens and sunny 
pastures of Sicily ; but the intercourse between the courts of 
Hiero and the Ptolemies seems to have been continual. Poets 
and philosophers moved freely from one to the other, and found 
a like atmosphere in both ; and in one of Theocritus's idyls, two 
Sicilian gentlemen crossed in love, agree to sail for Alexandria, 
and volunteer into the army of the great and good King Ptolemy, 
of whom a sketch is given worth reading ; as a man noble, gen- 
erous, and stately, " knowing well who loves him, and still better 
who loves him not." He has another encomium on Ptolemy, 
more laboured, but not less interesting : but the real value of 
Theocritus lies in his powers of landscape-painting. 

One can well conceive the delight which his idyls must have 
given to those dusty Alexandrins, pent up for ever between sea 
and sand-hills, drinking the tank-water, and never hearing the 
sound of a running stream, — whirling, too, for ever, in all the 
bustle and intrigue of a great commercial and literary city. 
Refreshing indeed it must have been to them to hear of those 
simple joys and simple sorrows of the Sicilian shepherd, in a land 
where toil was but exercise, and mere existence was enjoyment. 
To them, and to us also. I believe Theocritus is one of the 
poets who will never die. He sees men and things, in his own 
light way, truly ; and he describes them simply, honestly, with 
little careless touches of pathos and humour, while he floods his 
whole scene with that gorgeous Sicilian air, like one of Titian's 
pictures ; with still sunshine, whispering pines, the lizard sleep- 
ing on the wall, and the sunburnt cicala shrieking on the spray, 
the pears and apples dropping from the orchard bough, the goats 
clambering from crag to crag after the cistus and the thyme, the 



344 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

brown youths and wanton lasses singing under the dark chestnut 
boughs, or by the leafy arch of some — 

" Grot nymph-haunted, 
Garlanded over with vine, and acanthus, and clambering roses, 
Cool in the fierce still noon, where the streams glance clear in the moss-beds ; " 

and here and there, beyond the braes and meads, blue glimpses 
of the far-off summer sea ; and all this told in a language and a 
metre which shapes itself almost unconsciously, wave after wave, 
into the most luscious song. Doubt not that many a soul then, 
was the simpler, and purer, and better, for reading the sweet 
singer of Syracuse. He has his immoralities ; but they are the 
immoralities of his age : his naturalness, his sunny calm and 
cheerfulness, are all his own. 

And now, to leave the poets, and speak of those grammarians 
to whose corrections we owe, I suppose 5 the texts of the Greek 
poets «as they now stand. They seem to have set to work at 
their task methodically enough, under the direction of their most 
literary monarch, Ptolemy Philadelphus. Alexander the JEto- 
lian collected and revised the tragedies, Lycophron the come- 
dies, Zenodotus the poems of Homer, and the other poets of the 
Epic cycle, now lost to us. Whether Homer prospered under 
all his expungings, alterations, and transpositions — whether, in 
fact, he did not treat Homer very much as Bentley wanted to 
treat Milton, is a suspicion which one has a right to entertain, 
though it is long past the possibility of proof. Let that be as it 
may, the critical business grew and prospered. Aristophanes of 
Byzantium wrote glossaries and grammars, collected editions of 
Plato and Aristotle, aesthetic disquisitions on Homer, — one wishes 
they were preserved, for the sake of the jest, that one might 
have seen an Alexandrian cockney's views of Achilles and Ulys- 
ses ! Moreover, in a hapless moment, at least for us moderns, 
he invented Greek accents ; thereby, I fear, so complicating and 
confusing our notions of Greek rythm, that we shall never, to 
the end of time, be able to guess what any Greek verse, saving 
the old Homeric Hexameter, sounded like. After a while, too, 
the pedants, according to their wont, began quarrelling about 
their accents and their recensions. Moreover, there was a rival 
school at Pergamus, where the fame of Crates all but equalled 
the Egyptian fame of Aristarchus. Insolent ! What right had 
an Asiatic to know anything ? So Aristarchus flew furiously on 
Crates, being a man of plain common sense, who felt a correct 
reading a far more important thing than any of Crates's illustra- 
tions, aesthetic, historical, or mythological ; a preference not yet 
quite extinct, in one, at least, of our Universities. " Sir," said a 
clever Cambridge Tutor to a philosophically inclined freshman, 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 345 

" remember, that our business is to translate Plato correctly, not 
to discover his meaning." And, paradoxical as it may seem, he 
was right. Let us first have accuracy, the merest mechanical 
accuracy, in every branch of knowledge. Let us know what the 
thing is which we are looking at. Let us know the exact words 
an author uses. Let us get at the exact value of each word by 
that severe induction of which Buttmann and the great Germans 
have set such noble examples ; and then, and not till then, we 
may begin to talk about philosophy, and aesthetics, and the rest. 
Very probably Aristarchus was right in his dislike of Crates's 
preference of what he called criticism, to grammar. Very prob- 
ably he connected it with the other object of his especial hatred, 
that fashion of interpreting Homer allegorically, which was 
springing up in his time, and which afterwards under the Neo- 
platonists rose to a frantic height, and helped to destroy in them, 
not only their power of sound judgment, and of asking each thing 
patiently what it was, but also any real reverence for, or under- 
standing of, the very authors over whom they declaimed and 
sentimentalized. 

Yes — the Cambridge Tutor was right. Before you can tell 
what a man means, you must have patience to find out what he- 
says. So far from wishing our grammatical and philological 
education to be less severe than it is, I think iti»is not severe 
enough. In an age like this — an age of lectures, and of popular 
literature, and of self-culture, too often random and capricious, 
however earnest, we cannot be too careful in asking ourselves, 
•in compelling others to ask themselves, the meaning of every 
word which they use, of every word which they read ; in assur- 
ing them, whether they will believe us or not, that the moral, 
as well as the intellectual culture, acquired by translating accu- 
rately one dialogue of Plato, by making out thoroughly the 
sense of one chapter of a standard author, is greater than they 
will get from skimming whole folios of Schlegelian aesthetics, 
resumes, histories of philosophy? and the like second-hand infor- 
mation, or attending seven lectures a-week till their lives' end. 
It is better to know one thing, than to know about ten thousand 
things. I cannot help feeling painfully, after reading those most 
interesting Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that the especial 
danger of this time is intellectual sciolism, vagueness, sentimen- 
tal eclecticism — and feeling, too, that, as Socrates of old believed, 
that intellectual vagueness and shallowness, however glib, and 
grand, and eloquent it may seem, is inevitably the parent of a 
moral vagueness and shallowness which may leave our age as it 
left the later Greeks, without an absolute standard of right or of 
truth, till it tries to escape from its own skepticism, as the later 

15* 



34:6 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Neoplatonists did, by plunging desperately into any fetish-wor- 
shipping superstitition which holds out to its wearied, and yet 
impatient intellect, the bait of decisions already made for it, of 
objects df admiration already formed, and systematized. 

Therefore let us honour the grammarian in his place ; and, 
among others, these old grammarians of Alexandria ; only being 
sure that as soon as any man begins, as they did, displaying him- 
self peacock-fashion, boasting of his science as the great pursuit 
of humanity, and insulting his fellow-craftsmen, he becomes, ipso 
facto , unable to discover any more truth for us, having put on a 
habit of mind to which induction is impossible ; and is thence- 
forth to be passed by with a kindly, but a pitying smile. And 
so, indeed, it happened with these quarrelsome Alexandrian 
grammarians ; as it did with the Casaubons, and Scaligers and 
Daciers of the last two centuries. As soon as they began quar- 
relling, they lost the power of discovering. The want of the 
inductive faculty in their attempts at philology, is utterly ludi- 
crous. Most of their derivations of words are about on a par 
with Jacob Bohmen's etymology of sulphur ; wherein he makes 
sul, if I recollect right, signify some active principle of com- 
bustion, and phur the passive one. It was left for more patient 
and less noisy men, like Grimm, Bopp, and Buttmann, to found 
a science of philology, to discover for us those great laws which 
connect modern philology with history, ethnology, physiology, 
and with the very deepest questions of theology itself. And, in 
the meanwhile, these Alexandrians' worthless criticism has been 
utterly swept away ; while their real work, their accurate editions 
of the classics, remain to us as a precious heritage. So it is 
. throughout history : nothing dies which is worthy to live. The 
wheat is surely gathered into the garner ; the chaff is burnt up 
by that eternal fire, which, happily for this universe, cannot be 
quenched by any art of man, but goes on for ever, devouring 
without indulgence all the folly and the falsehood of the world. 

As yet you have heard nothing of the metaphysical schools of 
Alexandria ; for as yet none have existed, in the modern accep- 
tation of that word. Indeed, I am not sure that I must not tell 
you frankly, that none ever existed at all in Alexandria, in that 
same modern acceptation. Hitter, I think, it is who complains, 
naively enough, that the Alexandrian JNeoplatonists had a bad 
habit, which grew on them more and more as the years rolled 
on, of mixing up philosophy with theology, and so defiling, or at 
all events colouring, its pure transparency. There is no denying 
the imputation, as I shall show at greater length in my next 
Lecture. But one would have thought, looking back through his- 
tory, that the Alexandrians were not the only philosophers guilty 



ALEXANDEIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 347 

of this shameful act of syncretism. Plato, one would have 
thought, was as great a sinner as they. So were the Hindoos. 
In spite of all their logical and metaphysical acuteness, they . 
were, you will find, unable to get rid of the notion that theologi- 
cal inquires concerning Brahma, Atma, Creeshna, were indisso- 
lubly mixed up with that same logic and metaphysic. The Par- 
sees could not separate questions about Ahriman and Ormuzd, 
from Kant's three great philosophic problems : What is Man ? — 
What may be known ? — What should be done ? Neither, indeed, 
could the earlier Greek sages. Not one of them, of any school 
whatever, — from the semi-mythic Seven Sages to Plato and 
Aristotle, — but finds it necessary to consider not in passing, but 
as the great object of research, questions concerning the gods : — 
whether they are real or not ; one or many ; personal or imper- 
sonal ; cosmic, and parts of the universe, or organizers and rulers 
of it ; in relation to man, or without relation to him. Even in 
those who flatly deny the existence of the gods, even in Lucre- 
tius himself, these questions have to be considered, before the 
question, What is man ? can get any solution at all. On the 
answer given to them is found to depend intimately the answer 
to the question, What is the immaterial part of man ? Is it a 
part of nature, or of something above nature ? Has he an im- 
material part at all ? — in one word, Is a human metaphysic pos- 
sible at all ? So it was with the Greek philosophers of old, even, 
as Asclepius and Ammonius say, with Aristotle himself. " The 
object of Aristotle's metaphysic," one of them says, " is theologi- 
cal. Herein Aristotle theologizes." And there is no denying 
the assertion. We must not then be hard on the Neojalatonists, 
as if they were the first to mix things separate from the founda- 
tion of the world. I do not say, that theology and metaphysic 
are separate studies. That is to be ascertained only by seeing 
some k one separate them. And when I see them separated, I 
shall believe them separable. Only the separation must not be 
produced by the simple expedient of denying the existence of either 
one of them, or at least of ignoring the existence of one steadily 
during the study of the other. If they can be parted without in- 
jury to each other, let them be parted ; and till then let us sus- 
pend hard judgments on the Alexandrian school of metaphysic, 
and also on the schools of that curious people the Jews, who had 
at this period a steadily increasing influence on the thought, as 
well as on the commercial prosperity, of Alexandria. 

You must not suppose, in the meanwhile, that the philosophers 
whom the Ptolemies collected (as they would have any other 
marketable article) by liberal offers of pay and patronage, were 
such men as the old Seven Sages of Greece, or as Socrates, 



848 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Plato, and Aristotle. In these last three indeed, Greek thought 
reached not merely its greatest height, but the edge of a preci- 
pice, down which it rolled headlong after their decease. The 
intellectual defects of the Greek mind, of which I have already 
spoken, were doubtless one great cause of this decay : but, to 
my mind, moral causes had still more to do with it. The more 
cultivated Greek states, to judge from the writings of Plato, had 
not been an over-righteous people during the generation in which 
he lived. And in the generations which followed, they became 
an altogether wicked people ; immoral, unbelieving, hating good, 
and delighting in all which was evil. And it was in consequence 
of these very sins of theirs, as I think, that the old Hellenic race 
began to die out physically, and population throughout Greece to 
decrease with frightful rapidity, after the time of the Achaean 
league. The facts are well known ; and foul enough they are. 
When the Komans destroyed Greece, God was just and merciful. 
The eagles were gathered together only because the carrion 
needed to be removed from the face of God's earth. And at 
the time of which I now speak, the signs of approaching death 
were fearfully apparent. Hapless and hopeless enough were the 
clique of men out of whom the first two Ptolemies hoped to form 
a school of philosophy ; men certainly clever enough, and amus- 
ing withal, who might give the kings of Egypt many a shrewd 
lesson in king-craft, and the w r ays of this world, and the art of 
profiting by the folly of fools, and the selfishness of the selfish ; 
or who might amuse them, in default of fighting-cocks, by puns 
and repartees, and battles of logic ; " how one thing cannot be 
predicated of another," or " how the wise man is not only to 
overcome every misfortune, but not even to feel it," and other 
such mighty questions, which in those days hid that deep un- 
belief in any truth whatsoever, which was spreading fast over 
the minds of men. Such word-splitters were Stilpo and Diodorus, 
the slayer and the slain. They were of the Megaran school, and 
were named Dialectics ; and also, with more truth, Eristics, or 
quarrelers. Their clique had professed to follow Zeno and Soc- 
rates in declaring the instability of sensible presumptions and 
conclusions, in preaching an absolute and eternal Being. But 
there was this deep gulf between them and Socrates ; that while 
Socrates professed to be seeking for the Absolute and Eternal, 
for that which is, they were content with affirming that it exists. 
With him, as with the older sages, philosophy was a search for 
truth. With them it w 7 as a scheme of doctrines to be defended. 
And the dialectic on which they prided themselves so much, 
differed from his accordingly. He used it inductively, to seek 
out, under the notions and conceptions of the mind, certain abso- 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 349 

lute truths and laws of which they were only the embodiment. 
Words and thoughts were to him a field for careful and reverent 
induction, as the phenomena of nature are to us the disciples of 
Bacon. But with these hapless Megarans, who thought that 
they had found that for which Socrates professed only to seek 
dimly and afar off, and had got it safe in a dogma, preserved as 
it were in spirits and put by in a museum, the great use of dia- 
lectic was to confute opponents. Delight in their own subtlety 
grew on them, the worship not of objective truth, but of the 
forms of the intellect whereby it may be demonstrated ; till they 
became the veriest word-splitters, rivals of the old sophists whom 
their master had attacked, and justified too often Aristophanes' 
calumny, which confounded Socrates with his opponents, as a 
man whose aim was to make the worse appear the better reason. 

We have here, in both parties, all the marks of an age of ex- 
haustion, of skepticism ; of despair about finding any real truth. 
No wonder that they were superseded by the Pyrrhonists, who 
doubted all things, and by the Academy, which prided itself on 
setting up each thing to knock it down again ; and so by prudent 
and well-bred and tolerant qualifying of every assertion, neither 
affirming too much, nor denying too much, keep their minds in a 
wholesome — or unwholesome — state of equilibrium, as stagnant 
pools are kept, that everything may have free toleration to rot 
undisturbed. 

These hapless caricaturists of the dialectic of Plato, and the 
logic of Aristotle, careless of any vital principles or real results, 
ready enough to use fallacies each for their own party, and 
openly proud of their success in doing so, were assisted by 
worthy compeers of an outwardly opposite tone of thought, the 
Cyrenaics, Theodoras, and Hegesias. With their clique, as with 
their master Aristippus, the senses were the only avenues to 
knowledge; man was the measure of all things; and "happiness, 
our being's end and aim." Theodoras was surnamed the Atheist; 
and, it seems, not without good reason ; for he taught that there 
was no absolute or eternal difference between good and evil ; 
nothing really disgraceful in crimes ; no divine ground for laws, 
which according to him had been invented by men to prevent 
fools from making themselves disagreeable ; on which theory, 
law T s must be confessed to have been in all ages somewhat of a 
failure. He seems to have been, like his master, an impudent, 
light-hearted fellow, who took life easily enough, laughed at pat- 
riotism, and all other high-flown notions, boasted that the world 
was his country, and was no doubt excellent after-dinner company 
for the great king. Hegesias, his fellow Cyrenaic, was a man of 
a darker and more melancholic temperament ; and while Theo- 



350 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

dorus contented himself with preaching a comfortable selfishness, 
and obtaining pleasure, made it rather his study to avoid pain. 
Doubtless both their theories were popular enough at Alexan- 
dria, as they were in France during the analogous period, the 
Siecle Louis Quinze. The Contract Social, and the rest of 
their doctrines, moral and metaphysical, will always have their 
admirers on earth, as long as that variety of the human species 
exists, for whose especial behoof Theodorus held that laws were 
made ; and the whole form of thought met with great approba- 
tion in after years at Rome, where Epicurus carried it to its 
highest perfection. After that, under the pressure of a train of 
rather severe lessons, which Gibbon has detailed in his Decline 
and Fall of the Roman Empire, little or nothing was heard of 
it, save sotto voce, perhaps, at the Papal courts of the sixteenth 
century. To revive it publicly, or at least as much of it as could 
be borne by a world now for seventeen centuries Christian, was 
the glory of the eighteenth century. The moral scheme of 
Theodorus has now nearly vanished among us, at least as a con- 
fessed creed : and, in spite of the authority of Mr. Locke's great 
and good name, his metaphysical scheme is showing signs of a 
like approaching disappearance. Let us hope that it may be a 
speedy one ; for if the senses be the only avenues to knowledge ; 
if man be the measure of all things ; and if law have not, as 
Hooker says, her fount and home in the very bosom of God him- 
self, then was Homer's Zeus right in declaring man to be " the 
most wretched of all the beasts of the field." 

And yet one cannot help looking with a sort of awe (I dare not 
call it respect) at that melancholic, faithless Hegesias. Doubt- 
less he, like his compeers, and indeed all Alexandria for three 
hundred years, cultivated philosophy with no more real purpose 
than it was cultivated by the graceless beaux-esprits of Louis 
the Fifteenth's court, and with as little practical effect on moral- 
ity : but of this Hegesias alone it stands written, that his teach- 
ing actually made men do something ; and moreover, do the 
most solemn and important thing which any man can do, except- 
ing always doing Right. I must confess, however, that the result 
of his teaching took so unexpected a form, that the reigning 
Ptolemy, apparently Philadelphus, had to interfere with the 
sacred right of every man to talk as much nonsense as he likes, 
and forbade Hegesias to teach at Alexandria. For Hegesias, a 
Cyrenaic like Theodorus, but a rather more morose pedant than 
that saucy and happy scoffer, having discovered that the great 
end of man was to avoid pain, also discovered (his digestion 
being probably in a disordered state) that there was so much 
more pain than pleasure in the world, as to make it a thoroughly 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 351 

disagreeable place, of which man was well rid at any price. 
Whereon he wrote a book called 'ATroKaprepuv, in which a man 
who had determined to starve himself preached the miseries of 
human life, and the blessings of death, with such overpowering 
force, that the book actually drove many persons to commit sui- 
cide, and escape from a world which was not fit to dwell in. — 
A fearful proof of how rotten the state of society was becoming, 
how desperate the minds of men, during those frightful centuries 
which immediately preceded the Christian era, and how fast was 
approaching that dark chaos of unbelief and unrighteousness, 
' which Paul of Tarsus so analyses and describes in the first chap- 
ter of his Epistle to the Romans ; — when the old light was lost, 
the old faiths extinct, the old reverence for the laws of family, 
and national life, destroyed, yea even the natural instincts them- 
selves perverted ; that chaos whose darkness Juvenal, and Pe- 
tronius, and Tacitus have proved, in their fearful pages, not to 
have been exaggerated by the more compassionate, though more 
righteous Jew. 

And now observe, that this selfishness — this wholesome state 
of equilibrium — this philosophic calm, wdiich is really only a lazy 
pride, w r as, as far as w T e can tell, the main object of all the schools 
from the time of Alexander to the Christian era. TTe know 
very little of those Skeptics, Cynics, Epicureans, Academics, 
Peripatetics, Stoics, of whom there has been so much talk ; ex- 
cept at second hand, through the Romans, from whom Stoi- 
cism in after ao;es received a new and not ignoble life. But 
this we do know of the later sects, that they gradually gave up 
the search for truth, and propounded to themselves as the great 
type for a philosopher,. How shall a man save his own soul from 
this evil world ? They may have been right ; it may have been 
the best thing to think about in those exhausted and decaying 
times: but it was a question of ethics, not of philosophy, in the 
sense which the old Greek sages put on that latter word. Their 
object was, not to get at the laws of all things, but to fortify them- 
selves against all things, each according to his scheme, and so 
to be self-sufficient and alone. Even in the Stoics, who boldly 
and righteously asserted an immutable morality, this was the 
leading conception. As has been well said of them : — 

" If we reflect how r deeply the feeling of an intercourse be- 
tween men and a divine race superior to themselves had worked 
itself into the Greek character, — what a number of fables, some 
beautiful, some impure, it had impregnated and procured credence 
for, — how it sustained every form of polity and every system of 
laws, w T e may imagine what the effects must have been of its dis- 
appearance. If it is possible for any man, it was not, certainly. 



352 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

possible for a Greek, to feel himself connected by any real bonds 
with his fellow-creatures around him, while he felt himself utterly 
separated from any being above his fellow-creatures. But the 
sense of that isolation would affect different minds very differ- 
ently. It drove the Epicurean to consider how he might make 
a world in which he should live comfortably, without distracting 
visions of the past and future, and the dread of those upper 
powers who no longer awakened in him any feelings of sym- 
pathy. It drove Zeno the Stoic to consider whether a man may 
not find enough in himself to satisfy him, though what is beyond 
him be ever so unfriendly We may trace in the produc- 
tions which are attributed to Zeno a very clear indication of the 
feeling which was at work in his mind. He undertook, for in- 
stance, among other tasks, to answer Plato's Republic, The 
truth that a man is a political being/ which informs and pervades 
that book, was one which must have been particularly harass- 
ing to his mind, and which he felt must be got rid of, before he 

could hope to assert his doctrine of a man's solitary dignity." 

Woe to the nation or the society in which this individualizing 
and separating process is going on in the human mind ! Whether 
it take the form of a religion or of a philosophy, it is at once the 
sign and the cause of senility, decay, and death. If man begins 
to forget that he is a social being, a member of a body, and that 
the only truths which can avail him anything, the only truths 
which are worthy objects of his philosophical search, are those 
which are equally true for every man, which will equally avail 
every man, which he must proclaim, as far as he can, to every 
man, from the proudest sage to the meanest outcast, he enters, I 
believe, into a lie, and helps forward the dissolution of that society 
of which he is a member. I care little whether what he holds 
be true or not. If it be true, he has made it a lie by appropriat- 
ing it proudly and selfishly to himself, and by excluding others 
from it. He has darkened his own power of vision by that act 
of self-appropriation, so that even if he sees a truth, he can only 
see it refractedly, discoloured by the medium of his own private 
likes and dislikes, and fulfils that great and truly philosophic 
law, that he who loveth not his brother is in darkness, and 
knoweth not whither he goeth. And so it befell those old Greek 
schools. It is out of our path to follow them to Italy, where 
sturdy old Roman patriots cursed them, and with good reason, 
as corrupting the morals of the young. Our business is with 
Alexandria ; and there, certainly, they did nothing for the eleva- 
tion of humanity. What culture they may have given, probably 
helped to make the Alexandrians, what Caesar calls them, . the 
most ingenious of all nations : but righteous or valiant men it 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 353 

did not make them. When, after the three great reigns of Soter, 
Philadelphia, and Euergetes, the race of the Ptolemies began 
to wear itself out, Alexandria fell morally, as its sovereigns 
fell : and during a miserable and shameful decline of a hundred 
and eighty years, sophists wrangled, pedants fought over accents 
and readings with the true odium grammaticum, and kings 
plunged deeper and deeper into the abysses of luxury and incest, 
laziness and cruelty, till the flood came, and swept them all 
away. Cleopatra, the Helen of Egypt, betrayed her country to 
the Roman ; and thenceforth the Alexandrians became slaves in 
all but name. 

And now that Alexandria has become a tributary province, 
is it to share the usual lot of enslaved countries, and lose all 
originality and vigour of thought ? Not so. From this point, 
strangely enough, it begins to have a philosophy of its own. 
Hitherto it has been importing Greek thought into Egypt and 
Syria, even to the furthest boundaries of Persia ; and the whole 
East has become Greek : but it has received little in return. 
The Indian Gymnosophists, or Brahmins, had little or no effect 
on Greek philosophy, except in the case of Pyrrho : the Persian 
Dualism still less. The Egyptian symbolic nature worship had 
been too gross to be regarded by the cultivated Alexandrian as 
anything but a barbaric superstition. One eastern nation had 
intermingled closely with the Macedonian race, and from it 
Alexandrian thought received a new impulse. 

I mentioned in my first lecture the conciliatory policy which 
the Ptolemies had pursued toward the Jews. Soter had not 
only allowed, but encouraged them to settle in Alexandria and 
Egypt, granting them the same political privileges with the 
Macedonians, and other Greeks. Soon they built themselves a 
temple there, in obedience to some supposed prophecy in their 
sacred writings, which seems most probably to have been a wilful 
interpolation. Whatsoever value we may attach to the various 
myths concerning the translation of their Scriptures into Greek, 
there can be no doubt that they were translated in the reign of 
Soter, and that the exceedingly valuable Septuagint version is 
the work of that period. Moreover, their numbers in Alexandria 
were very great. When Amrou took Constantinople in A. d. 
640, there were 40,000 Jews in it ; and their numbers during 
the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, before their temporary ex- 
pulsion by Cyril about 412, were probably greater; and Egypt 
altogether is said to have contained 200,000 Jews. They had 
schools there, which were so esteemed by their whole nation 
throughout the East, that the Alexandrian Rabbis, the Light of 
Israel, as they were called, may be fairly considered as the 
centre of Jewish thought and learning for several centuries. 



354 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

We are accustomed, and not without reason, to think with 
some contempt of these old Rabbis. Rabbinism, Cabbalism, are 
become by-words in the mouths of men. It may be instructive 
for us — it is certainly necessary for us, if we wish to understand 
Alexandria — to examine a little how they became so fallen. 

Their philosophy took its stand, as you all know, on certain 
ancient books of their people ; histories, laws, poems, philosophi- 
cal treatises, which all have one element peculiar to themselves, 
namely, the assertion of a living personal Ruler and Teacher, 
not merely of the Jewish race, but of all the nations of the earth. 
After the return of their race from Babylon, their own records 
give abundant evidence that this strange people became the most 
exclusive and sectarian which Jthe world ever saw. Into the 
causes of that exclusiveness I will not now enter ; suffice it to 
say, that it was pardonable enough in a people asserting Mono- 
theism in the midst of idolatrous nations, and who knew, from 
experience even more bitter than that which taught Plato and 
Socrates, how directly all those popular idolatries led to every 
form of baseness and immorality. But we may trace in them, 
from the date of their return from Babylon, especially from their 
settlement in Alexandria, a singular change of opinion. In pro- 
portion as they began to deny that their unseen personal Ruler 
had anything to do with the Gentiles,— the nations of the earth, 
as they called them ; in proportion as they considered themselves 
as his only subjects — or rather, him and his guidance as their 
own private property, — exactly in that proportion they began to 
lose all living or practical belief that he did guide them. He 
became a being of the past ; one who had taught and governed 
their forefathers in old times : not one who was teaching and 
governing them now. I beg you to pay attention to this curious 
result ; because you will see, I think, the very same thing occur- 
ring in two other Alexandrian schools, of which I shall speak 
hereafter. 

The result to these Rabbis was, that the inspired books which 
spoke of this Divine guidance and government became objects of 
superstitious reverence, just in proportion as they lost all under- 
standing of their real value and meaning. Nevertheless, this, too, 
produced good results ; for the greatest possible care was taken to 
fix the Canon of these books ; to settle, as far as possible, the exact 
time at which the Divine guidance was supposed to have ceased ; 
after which it was impious to claim a Divine teaching ; when their 
sages were left to themselves, as they fancied, with a complete 
body of knowledge, on which they were henceforth only to com- 
ment. Thus, whether or not they were right in supposing that 
the Divine Teacher had ceased to teach and inspire them, they 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 355 

did infinite service by marking out for us certain writers whom 
he had certainly taught and inspired. No doubt they were right 
in their sense of the awful change which had passed over their 
nation. There was an infinite difference between them and the 
old Hebrew writers. They had lost something which those old 
prophets possessed. I invite you to ponder, each for himself, on 
the causes of this strange loss : bearing in mind that they lost 
their forefathers' heir-loom, exactly in proportion as they began to 
believe it to be their exclusive possession, and to deny other 
human beings any right to, or share in it. It may have been 
that the light given to their forefathers had, as they thought, 
really departed. It may have been, also, that the light was there 
all around them still, as bright as ever : but that they would not 
open their eyes and behold it ; or rather, could not open them, 
because selfishness and pride had sealed them. It may have 
been, that inspiration was still very near them, too, if their spirits 
had been willing to receive it. But of the fact of the change 
there was no doubt. For the old Hebrew seers were men deal- 
ing with the loftiest and deepest laws : the Rabbis were shallow 
pedants. The old Hebrew seers were righteous and virtuous 
men : the Rabbis became, in due time, some of the worst and 
wickedest men who ever trod this earth. 

Thus they, too, had their share in that downward career of 
pedantry which we have seen characterize the whole past Alex- 
andrine age. They, like Zenodotus and Aristarchus, were com- 
mentators, grammarians, sectarian disputers : they were not 
thinkers or actors. Their inspired books were to them no more 
the words of living human beings who had sought for the Abso- 
lute Wisdom, and found it after many sins and doubts and sor- 
rows. The human writers became in their eyes^ the puppets and 
mouth-pieces of some magical influence, not the disciples of a 
living and loving person. The book itself was, in their belief, 
not in any true sense inspired, but magically dictated — by what 
power they cared not to define. His character was unimportant 
to them, provided he had inspired no nation but their own. But, 
thought they, if the words were dictated, each of them must have 
some mysterious value. And if each word had a mysterious 
value, why not each letter ? And how could they set limits to 
that mysterious value ? Might not these words, even rearrange- 
ments of the letters of them, be useful in protecting them against 
the sorceries of the heathen, in driving away those evil spirits, or 
evoking those good spirits, who though seldom mentioned in their 
early records, had after their return from Babylon begun to form 
an important part of their unseen world ? For as they had lost 
faith in the One Preserver of their race, they had filled up the 



356 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

void by a ponderous denionology of innumerable preservers. This 
process of thought was not confined to Alexandria. Dr. Layard, 
in his last book on Nineveh, gives some curious instances of its 
prevalence among them at an earlier period, well worth your 
careful study. But it was at Alexandria that the Jewish Cab- 
balism fo^jmed itself into a system. It was there that the Jews 
learnt to become the jugglers and magic-mongers of the whole 
Roman world, till Claudius had to expel them from Rome, as 
pests to rational and moral society. 

And yet, among these hapless pedants there lingered nobler 
thoughts and hopes. They could not read the glorious heir- 
looms of their race without finding in them records of antique 
greatness and virtue, of old deliverances worked for their fore- 
fathers ; and what seemed promises, too, that that greatness 
should return. The notion that those promises were conditional ; 
that they expressed eternal moral laws, and declared the conse- 
quences of obeying those laws, they had lost long ago. By look- 
ing on themselves as exclusively and arbitrarily favoured by 
Heaven, they were ruining their own moral sense. Things 
were not right or wrong to them because Right was eternal and 
divine, and Wrong the transgression of that eternal right. How 
could that be ? For then the right things the Gentiles seemed 
to do would be right and divine ; — and that supposition in their 
eyes was all but impious. None could do right but themselves, 
for they only knew the law of God. So, right with them had 
no absolute or universal ground, but was reduced in their minds 
to the performance of certain acts commanded exclusively to 
them, — a form of ethics which rapidly sank into the most petty 
and frivolous casuistry as to the outward performance of those 
acts. The sequel of those ethics is known to all the world, in 
the spectacle of the most unrivalled religiosity, and scrupulous 
respectability, combined with a more utter absence of moral 
sense, in their most cultivated and learned men, than the world 
has ever beheld before or since. 

In such a state of mind it was impossible for them to look on 
their old prophets as true seers, beholding and applying eternal 
moral laws, and, therefore, seeing the future in the present and 
in the past. They must be the mere utterers of an irreversible 
arbitrary fate ; and that fate must, of course, be favourable to 
their nation. So, now arose a school who picked out from their 
old prophets every passage which could be made to predict their 
future glory, and a science which settled when that glory was to 
return. By the arbitrary rules of criticism a prophetic day was 
defined to mean a year ; a week, seven years. The most simple 
and human utterances were found to have recondite meanings 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 357 

relative to their future triumph over the heathens whbm they 
cursed and hated. — If any of you ever come across the popular 
Jewish interpretations of The Song of Solomon, you will there 
see the folly in which acute and learned men can indulge them- 
selves when they have lost hold of the belief in anything really 
absolute and eternal and moral, and have made Fate, and Time, 
and Self, their real deities. But this dream of a future restora- 
tion was in no wise ennobled, as far as we can see, with any 
desire for a moral restoration. They believed that a person 
would appear some day or other to deliver them. Even they 
were happily preserved by their sacred books from the notion 
that deliverance was to be found for them, or for any man, in an 
abstraction or notion ending in -ation or -ality. In justice to 
to them it must be said, that they were too wise to believe that 
personal qualities, such as power, will, love, righteousness, could 
reside in any but in a person, or be manifested except by a person. 
And among the earlier of them the belief may have been, that the 
ancient unseen Teacher of their race would be their deliverer : 
but as they lost the thought of him, the expected Deliverer 
became a mere human being : or rather, not a human being ; for 
as they lost their moral sense, they lost in the very deepest mean- 
ing their humanity, and forgot what man was like, till they learned 
to look only for a conqueror ; a manifestation of power, and not 
of goodness ; a destroyer of the hated heathen, who was to estab- 
lish them as the tyrant race of the whole earth. On that fearful 
day, on which, for a moment, they cast away even that last dream, 
and cried, " We have no king but Cassar," they spoke the secret 
of their hearts. It was a Cassar, a Jewish Cassar, whom they 
had been longing for for centuries. And if they could not have 
such a deliverer, they would have none : they would take up with 
the best embodiment of brute Titanic power which they could 
find, and crucify the embodiment of Righteousness and Love. — 
Amid all the metaphysical schools of Alexandria, I know none 
so deeply instructive as that school of the Rabbis, " the glory of 
Israel." 

But you will say, " This does not look like a school likely to 
regenerate Alexandrian thought." True : and yet it did regene- 
rate it, both for good and for evil; for these men had among 
them, and preserved faithfully enough for all practical purposes, 
the old literature of their race ; a literature which I firmly 
believe, if I am to trust the experience of 1900 years, is destined 
to explain all other literatures ; because it has firm hold of the 
one eternal root-idea which gives life, meaning, Divine sanction, 
to every germ or fragment of human truth which is in any of 
them. It did so, at least, in Alexandria for the Greek literature. 



358 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

About the Christian era, a cultivated Alexandrian Jew, a disciple 
of Plato and of Aristotle, did seem to himself to find in the sacred 
books of his nation that which agreed with the deepest discoveries 
of Greek philosophy ; which explained and corroborated them. 
And his announcement of this fact, weak and defective as it was, 
had the most enormous and unexpected results. — The father of 
New Platonism was Philo the Jew. 



LECTURE III. 



NEO-PLATONISM. 



We now approach the period in which Alexandria began to 
have a philosophy of its own — to be, indeed, the leader of human 
thought for several centuries. 

I shall enter on this branch of my subject with some fear and 
trembling ; not only on account of my own ignorance, but on 
account of the great difficulty of handling it without trenching on 
certain controversial subjects which are rightly and wisely forbid- 
den here. For there was not one school of Metaphysic at Alex- 
andria : there were two ; which, during the whole period of their 
existence, were in internecine struggle with each other, and yet 
mutually borrowing from each other ; the Heathen, namely, and 
the Christian. And you cannot contemplate, still less can you 
understand, the one without the other. Some of late years have 
become all but unaware of the existence of that Christian school : 
and the word Philosophy, on the authority of Gibbon, who, how- 
ever excellent an authority for facts, knew nothing about Philoso- 
phy, and cared less, has been used exclusively to express heathen 
thought ; a misnomer which in Alexandria would have astonished 
Plotinus or Hypatia as much as it would Clement or Origen. I 
do not say that there is, or ought to be, a Christian Metaphysic. 
I am speaking, as you know, merely as a historian, dealing with 
facts ; and I say that there was one ; as profound, as scientific, as 
severe, as that of the Pagan Neoplatonists ; starting indeed, as I 
shall show hereafter, on many points from common ground with 
theirs. One can hardly doubt, I should fancy, that many parts of 
St. John's Gospel and Epistles, whatever view we may take of 
them, if they are to be called anything, are to be called meta- 
physic and philosophic. And one can no more doubt that before 
writing them he had studied Philo, and was expanding Philo's 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 359 

thought in the direction which seemed fit to him, than we can 
doubt it of the earlier Neoplatonists. The technical language is 
often identical ; so are the primary ideas from which he starts, 
howsoever widely the conclusions may differ. If Plotinus con- 
sidered himself an intellectual disciple of Plato, so did Origen and 
Clemens. And I must, as I said before, speak of both, or of nei- 
ther. My only hope of escaping delicate ground lies in the curious 
fact, that rightly or wrongly, the form in which Christianity pre- 
sented itself to the old Alexandrian thinkers was so utterly differ- 
ent from the popular conception of it in modern England, that one 
may very likely be able to tell what little one knows about it, 
almost without mentioning a single doctrine which now influences 
the religious world. 

But far greater is my fear, that to a modern British audi- 
tory, trained in the school of Locke, much of ancient thought, 
heathen as well as Christian, may seem so utterly the product of 
the imagination, so utterly without any corresponding reality in 
the .universe, as to look like mere unintelligible madness. Still, 
I must try ; only entreating my hearers to consider, that how 
much soever we may honour Locke and his great Scotch follow- 
ers, we are not bound to believe them either infallible, or alto- 
gether world-embracing ; that there have been other methods 
than theirs of conceiving the Unseen ; that the common ground 
from which both Christian and heathen Alexandrians start, is 
not merely a private vagary of their own ; but one which has 
been accepted undoubtingly, under so many various forms, by so 
many different races, as to give something of an inductive proba- 
bility that it is not a mere dream, but may be a right and true 
instinct of the human mind. I mean the belief that the things 
which we see — nature and all her phenomena — are temporal, 
and born only to die ; mere shadows of some unseen realities, 
from whom their laws and life are derived ; while the eternal 
things which subsist without growth, decay or change, the only 
real, only truly existing things, in short, are certain things which 
are not seen ; inappreciable by sense, or understanding, or imagina- 
tion, perceived only by the conscience and the reason. And that 
again, the problem of philosophy, the highest good for man, that 
for the sake of which death were a gain, without which life is 
worthless, a drudgery, a degradation, a failure, and a ruin, is to 
discover what those unseen eternal things are, to know them, 
possess them, be in harmony with them, and thereby alone to 
rise to any real and solid power, or safety, or nobleness. It is a 
strange dream. But you will see that it is one which does not 
bear much upon " points of controversy," any more than on 
" Locke's philosophy : " nevertheless, when we find this same 



360 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

strange dream arising, apparently without inter-communion of 
thought, among the old Hindoos, among the Greeks, among the 
Jews ; and lastly, when we see it springing again in the middle 
age, in the mind. of the almost forgotten author of the Deut- 
sche Theologie, and so becoming the parent, not merely of 
Luther's deepest belief, or of the German mystic schools of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but of the great German 
Philosophy itself as developed by Kant, and Fichte, and Schel- 
ling, and Hegel, we must at least confess it to be a popular delu- 
sion, if nothing better, vast enough and common enough to be 
worth a little patient investigation, wheresoever we may find it 
stirring the human mind. 

But I have hope, still, that Xmay find sympathy and compre- 
hension among some, at least, of my audience, as I proceed to 
examine the ancient realist schools of Alexandria, on account of 
their knowledge of the modern realist schools of Germany. For 
I cannot but see, that a revulsion is taking place in the thoughts 
of our nation upon metaphysic subjects, and that Scotland, as 
usual, is taking the lead therein. That most illustrious Scotch- 
man, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, first vindicated the great German 
Realists from the vulgar misconceptions about them which were 
so common at the beginning of this century, and brought the 
minds of studious men to a more just appreciation of the philo- 
sophic severity, the moral grandeur, of such thinkers as Eman- 
uel Kant, and Gottlieb Fichte. To another Scotch gentleman, 
who, I believe, has honoured me by his presence here to night, 
we owe most valuable translations of some of Fichte's works ; 
to be followed, I trust, by more. And though, as a humble disci- 
ple of Bacon, I cannot but think that the method both of Kant 
and Fichte possesses somewhat of the same inherent defect as 
the method of the Neoplatonist school, yet I should be most un- 
fair did I not express my deep obligations to them, and advise 
all those to study them carefully, who wish to gain a clear con- 
ception either of the old Alexandrian schools, or of those intel- 
lectual movements which are agitating the modern mind, and 
which will, I doubt not, issue in a clearer light, and in a nobler 
life, if not for us, yet still for our children's children for ever. 

The name of Philo the Jew is now all but forgotten among 
us. He was laughed out of sight during the last century, as a 
dreamer and an allegorist, who tried eclectically to patch together 
Plato and Moses. The present age, however, is rapidly begin- 
ning to suspect that all who thought before the eighteenth cen- 
tury were not altogether either fools or imposters ; old wisdom is 
obtaining a fairer hearing day by day, and is found not to be so 
contradictory to new wisdom as was supposed. We are begin- 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 361 

ning, too, to be more inclined to justify Providence, by believing 
that lies are by their very nature impotent and doomed to die ; that 
everj 7 thing which has had any great or permanent influence on 
the human mind, must have in it some germ of eternal truth ; 
and setting ourselves to separate that germ of truth from the 
mistakes which may have distorted and overlaid it. Let us 
believe, or at least hope the same, for a few minutes, of Philo, 
and try to find out what was the secret of his power, what the 
secret of his weakness. 

First. I cannot think that he had to treat his own sacred 
books unfairly, to make them agree with the root-idea of Soc- 
rates and Plato. Socrates and Plato acknowledged a Divine 
teacher of the human spirit ; that was the ground of their phi- 
losophy. So did the literature of the Jews. Socrates and Plato, 
with all the Greek sages till the Sophistic era, held that the 
object of philosophy was the search after that which truly exists : 
that he who found that, found wisdom : Philo's books taught him 
the same truth : but they taught him also, that the search for 
wisdom was not merely the search for that which is, but for Him 
who is ; not for a thing, but for a person. I do not mean that 
Plato and the elder Greeks had not that object also in view ; 
for I have said already that Theology was with them the ulti- 
mate object of all metaphysic science : but I do think that they 
saw it infinitely less clearly than the old Jewish sages. Those 
sages were utterly unable to conceive of an absolute truth, 
except as residing in an absolutely true person ; of absolute wis- 
dom, except in an absolutely wise person ; of an absolute order 
and law, except in a lawgiver ; of an absolute good, except in an 
absolutely good person ; any more than either they or we can 
conceive of an absolute love, except in an absolutely loving per- 
son. I say boldly, that I think them right, on all grounds of 
Baconian induction. For all these qualities are only known to 
us as exhibited in persons ; and if we believe them to have any 
absolute and eternal existence at all, to be objective, and inde- 
pendent of us, and the momentary moods and sentiments of our 
own mind, they must exist in some absolute and eternal person, 
or they are mere notions, abstractions, words, which have no 
counterparts. 

But here arose a puzzle in the mind of Philo, as it in reality 
had, we may see, in the minds of Socrates and Plato. How 
could he reconcile the idea of that absolute and eternal one 
Being, that Zeus, Father of Gods and men, self-perfect, self-con- 
tained, without change or motion, in whom, as a Jew, he believed 
even more firmly than the Platonists, with the Daemon of Soc- 
rates, the Divine Teacher whom both Plato and Solomon con- 

16 



362 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

fessed ? . Or how, again, could he reconcile the idea of Him with 
the creative and providential energy, working in space and time, 
working on matter, and apparently affected and limited, if not 
baffled, by the imperfection of the minds which he taught, by the 
imperfection of the matter which he moulded ? This, as all stu- 
dents of philosophy must know, was one of the great puzzles of 
old Greek philosophy, as long as it was earnest and cared to 
have any puzzles at all ; it has been, since the days of Spinoza, 
the great puzzle of all earnest modern philosophers. Philo 
offered a solution in that idea of a Logos, or Word of God, 
Divinity articulate, speaking and acting in time and space, and 
therefore by successive acts ; and so doing, in time and space, 
the will of the timeless and spaceless Father, the Abysmal and 
Eternal Being, of whom He was the perfect likeness. In calling 
this person the Logos, and making Him the source of all human 
reason, and knowledge of eternal laws, he only translated from 
Hebrew into Greek the name which he found in his sacred 
books, " The Word of God." As jet we have found no unfair 
allegorizing of Moses, or twisting of Plato. How then has he 
incurred this accusation ? 

I cannot think, again, that he was unfair in supposing that he 
might hold at the same time the Jewish belief concerning Crea- 
tion, and the Platonic doctrine of the real existence of Arche- 
typal ideas, both of moral and of physical phenomena. I do 
not mean that such a conception was present consciously to the 
mind of the old Jews, as it was most certainly to the mind of 
Saint Paul, a practised Platonic dialectician ; but it seems to me, 
as to Philo, to be a fair, perhaps a necessary corollary from the 
Genetic Philosophy, both of Moses and of Solomon. 

But in one thing he was unfair ; namely, in his allegorizing. 
But unfair to whom ? To Socrates and Plato, I believe, as much 
as to Moses and to Samuel. For what is the part of the old 
Jewish books which he evaporates away into mere mystic sym- 
bols of the private experiences of the devout philosopher ? Its 
practical, every-day histories, which deal with the common hu- 
man facts of family and national life, of man's outward and 
physical labour and craft. These to him have no meaning, ex- 
cept an allegoric one. But has he thrown them away for the 
sake of getting a step nearer to Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle ? 
Surely not. To them, as to the old Jewish sages, man is most 
important when regarded not merely as a soul, but as a man, a 
social being of flesh and blood. Aristotle declares politics to be 
the architectonical science, the family and social relations to be 
the eternal master-facts of humanity. Plato, in his Republic, 
sets before himself the Constitution of a State, as the crowning 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 363 

problem of his philosophy. Every work of his, like every say- 
ing of his master Socrates, deals with the common, outward, 
vulgar facts of human life, and asserts that there is a divine 
meaning in them, and that reverent induction from them is the 
way to obtain the deepest truths. Socrates and Plato were as 
little inclined to separate the man and the philosopher as Moses, 
Solomon, or Isaiah were. When Philo, by allegorizing away 
the simple, human parts of his books, is untrue to Moses' teach- 
ing, he becomes untrue to Plato's. He becomes untrue, I be- 
lieve, to a higher teaching than Plato's. He loses sight of an 
eternal truth, which even old Homer might have taught him, 
when he treats Moses as one section of his disciples in after 
years treated Homer. 

For what is the secret of the eternal freshness, the eternal 
beauty, ay, I may say boldly, in spite of all their absurdities and 
immoralities, the eternal righteousness of those old Greek myths ? 
What is it which made Socrates and Plato cling lovingly and 
reverently to them, they scarce knew why, while they deplored 
the immoralities to which they had given rise ? What is it 
which made those myths, alone of all old mythologies, the par- 
ents of truly beautiful sculpture, painting, poetry ? What is it 
which makes us love them still ; find, even at times against our 
consciences, new meaning, new beauty in them ; and brings 
home the story of Perseus or of Hercules, alike to the practised 
reason of Niebuhr, and the untutored instincts of ^siebuhr's 
little child, for whom he threw them into simplest forms ? Why 
is it that in spite of our disagreeing with their creed and their 
morality, we still persist — and long may we persist, or rather be 
compeUed — as it were by blind instinct, to train our boys upon 
those old Greek dreams ; and confess, whenever we try to find a 
substitute for them in our educational schemes, that we have as 
yet none ? Because those old Greek stories do represent the 
Deities as the archetypes, the kinsmen, the teachers, the friends, 
the inspirers of men. Because while the school-boy reads how 
the Gods were like to men, only better, wiser, greater ; how the 
Heroes are the children of the Gods, and the slayers of the 
monsters which devour the earth ; how Athene taught men 
weaving, and Phoebus music, and Vulcan the cunning of the 
stithy ; how the Gods took pity on the noble-hearted son of 
Danae, and lent him celestial arms, and guided him over desert 
and ocean to fulfil his vow ; — that boy is learning deep lessons of 
metaphysic, more in accordance with the reine vernunft, the pure 
reason whereby man perceives that which is moral, and spiritual, 
and eternal, than he would from all disquisitions about being and 
becoming, about actualities and potentialities, which ever tor- 
mented the weary brain of man. 



364 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Let us not despise the gem, because it has been broken to 
fragments, obscured by silt and mud. Still less let us fancy that 
one least fragment of it is not more precious than the most bril- 
liant paste jewel of our own compounding, though it be polished 
and facetted never so completely. For what are all these myths ■ 
but fragments of that great metaphysic idea, which, I boldly say, 
I believe to be at once the justifier and the harmonizer of all 
philosophic truth which man has ever discovered, or will dis- 
cover ; which Philo saw partially, and yet clearly ; which the 
Hebrew sages perceived far more deeply, because more humanly 
and practically; which Saint Paul the Platonist, and yet the 
Apostle, raised to its highest power, when he declared that the 
immutable and self-existent Being, for whom the Greek sages 
sought, and did not altogether seek in vain, has gathered together 
all things both in heaven and in earth in one inspiring and creat- 
ing Logos, who is both God and Man ? 

Be this as it may, we find that from the time of Philo, the 
deepest thought of the heathen world began to flow in a theologic 
channel. All the great heathen thinkers henceforth are theo- 
logians. In the times of Nero, for instance, Epictetus the slave, 
the regenerator of Stoicism, is no mere speculator concerning 
entities and quiddities, correct or incorrect. He is a slave search- 
ing for the secret of freedom, and finding that it consists in 
escaping not from a master, but from self: not to wealth and 
power, but to Jove. He discovers that Jove is, in some most 
mysterious, but most real sense, the Father of men ; he learns 
to look up to that Father as his guide and friend. 

Numenius, again, in the second century, was a man who had 
evidently studied Philo. He perceived so deeply, I may say so 
exaggeratedly, the analogy between the Jewish and the Platonic 
assertions of an Absolute and Eternal Being, side by side with 
the assertion of a Divine Teacher of man, that he is said to have 
uttered the startling saying, " What is Plato but Moses talking 
Attic ? " Doubtless Plato is not that : but the expression is 
remarkable, as showing the tendency of the age. He too looks 
up to God with prayers for the guidance of his reason. He too 
enters into speculation concerning God in his absoluteness, and 
in his connection with the universe. " The Primary God," he 
says, " must be free from works, and a King ; but the Demiurgus 
must exercise government, going through the heavens. Through 
Him comes this our condition ; through Him Reason being sent 
down in efflux, holds communion with all who are prepared for 
it ; God then looking down, and turning Himself to each of us, 
it comes to pass that our bodies live and are nourished, receiving 
strength from the outer rays which come from Him. But when 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 365 

God turns us to the contemplation of Himself, it comes to pass 
that these things are worn out and consumed, but that the reason 
lives, being partaker of a blessed life." 

This passage is exceedingly interesting, as containing both the 
marrow of old Hebrew metaphysic, and also certain notional ele- 
ments, of which we find no trace in the Scripture, and which 
may lead — as we shall find they afterwards did lead — to confus- 
ing the moral with the notional, and finally the notional with the 
material ; in plain words, to Pantheism. 

You find this tendency, in short, in all the philosophers who 
flourished between the age of Augustus and the rise of Alexan- 
drian Neoplatonism. Gibbon, while he gives an approving pat 
on the back to his pet " Philosophic Emperor," Marcus Aurelius, 
blinks the^fact that Marcus's philosophy, like that of Plutarch, 
contains as an integral element, a belief which to him would have 
been, I fear, simply ludicrous, from its strange analogy with the 
belief of John, the Christian Apostle. What is Marcus Aure- 
lius's cardinal doctrine ? That there is a God within him, a 
Word, a Logos, which " has hold of him," and who is his teacher 
and guardian ; that over and above his body and his soul, he has 
a Reason which is capable of " hearing that Divine Word, and 
obeying the monitions of that God." What is Plutarch's car- 
dinal doctrine ? That the same Word, the Daemon who spoke 
to the heart of Socrates, is speaking to him, and to every phi- 
losopher ; " coming into contact," he says, " with him in some 
wonderful manner ; addressing the reason of those, who like 
Socrates keep their reason pure, not under the dominion of pas- 
sion, nor mixing itself greatly with the body, and therefore quick 
and sensitive in responding to that which encountered it." 

You see from these two extracts what questions were arising 
in the minds of men, and how they touched on ethical and theo- 
logical questions. I say arising in their minds : I believe that I 
ought to say rather, stirred up in their minds by One greater 
than they. At all events there they appeared, utterly indepen- 
dent of any Christian teaching. The belief in this Logos or 
Daemon speaking to the Reason of man, was one which neither 
Plutarch nor Marcus, neither Numenius nor Ammonius, as far 
as we can see, learnt from the Christians ; it was the common 
ground which they held with them ; the common battle-field 
which they disputed with them. 

Neither have we any reason to suppose that they learnt it from 
the Hindoos. That much Hindoo thought mixed with Neoplatonist 
speculation, we cannot doubt : but there is not a jot more evidence 
to prove that Alexandrians borrowed this conception from the Ma- 
habharavata, than that George Fox the Quaker, or the author of 



366 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

the Deutsche Tkeologie, did so. They may have gone to Hindoo 
philosophy, or rather to second and third hand traditions thereof, 
for corroborations of the belief: but be sure, it must have ex- 
isted in their own hearts first, or they would never have gone 
thither. Believe it; be sure of it. No earnest thinker is a 
plagiarist pure and simple. He will never borrow from others 
that, which he has not already, more or less, thought out for 
himself. When once a great idea, instinctive, inductive, (for 
the two expressions are nearer akin than most fancy,) has 
dawned on his soul, he will welcome lovingly, awfully, any cor- 
roboration from foreign schools, and cry with joy : " Behold, 
this is not altogether a dream ; for others have found it also. 
Surely it must be real, universal, eternal." No ; be sure there 
is far more originality (in the common sense of the ^jvord) and 
far less (in the true sense of the word) than we fancy ; and that 
it is a paltry and shallow doctrine which represents each suc- 
ceeding school as merely the puppets and dupes of the preceding. 
More originality, because each earnest man seems to think out 
for himself the deepest grounds of his creed. Less originality, 
because, as I believe, one common Logos, Word, Reason, reveals 
and unveils the same eternal truth to all who seek and hunger 
for it. 

Therefore we can, as the Christian philosophers of Alexandria 
did, rejoice over every truth which their heathen adversaries 
beheld, and attribute them, as Clement does, to the highest source, 
to the inspiration of the one and universal Logos. With Clement, 
Philosophy is only hurtful when it is untrue to itself, and philo- 
sophy falsely so called ; true philosophy is an image of the truth, 
a divine gift bestowed on the Greeks. The Bible, in his eyes, 
asserts that all. forms of art and wisdom are from God. The 
wise in mind have no doubt some peculiar endowment of nature, 
but when they have offered themselves for their work, they re- 
ceive a spirit of perception from the Highest Wisdom, giving 
them a new fitness for it. All severe study, all cultivation of 
sympathy, are exercises of this spiritual endowment. The whole 
intellectual discipline of the Greeks, with their philosophy, came 
down from God to men. Philosophy, he concludes in one place, 
carries on "an inquiry concerning Truth and the nature of Being : 
and this Truth is that concerning which the Lord himself said, 
— ' I am the Truth.' And when the initiated find, or rather 
receive, the true philosophy, they have it from the Truth itself ; 
that is, from Him who is true." 

While, then, these two schools had so many grounds in com- 
mon, where was their point of divergence ? We shall find it, I 
believe, fairly expressed in the dying words of Plotinus, the great 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 367 

father of Neoplatonism. " I am striving to bring the God which 
is in us, into harmony with the God which is in the universe." 
Whether or not Plotinus actually so spoke, that was what his 
disciples not only said that he spoke, but what they would have 
wished him to speak. That one sentence expresses the whole 
object of their philosophy. 

But to that Panteenus, Origen, Clement, and Augustine would 
have answered, — " And we, on the other hand, assert that the 
God which is in the universe, is the same as the God which is 
in you, and is striving to bring you into harmony with himself." 
There is the experimentum cruets. There is the vast gulf be- 
tween the Christian and the Heathen schools, which when any 
man had overleaped, the whole problem of the universe was from 
that moment inverted. With Plotinus and his school man is 
seeking for God ; with Clemens and his, God is seeking for man. 
With the former, God is passive, and man active ; with the 
latter, God is active, man is passive, — passive, that is, in so far as 
his business is to listen when he is spoken to, to look at the light 
which is unveiled to him, to submit himself to the inward laws 
which he feels reproving and checking him at every turn, as 
Socrates was reproved and checked by his inward daemon. 

Whether of these two theorems gives the higher conception 
either of the Divine Being, or of man, I leave it for you to judge. 
To those old Alexandrian Christians, a being who was not seek-, 
ing after every single creature, and trying to raise him, could 
not be a Being of absolute Righteousness, Power, Love ; could 
not be a Being worthy of respect or admiration, even of philo- 
sophic speculation. Human righteousness and love flows forth 
disinterestedly to all around it, however unconscious, however 
unworthy they may be ; human power associated with goodness, 
seeks for objects which it may raise and benefit by that power. 
We must confess this, with the Christian schools, or, with the 
Heathen schools, we must allow another theory, which brought 
them into awful depths ; which may bring any generation which 
holds it into the same depths. 

If Clement had asked the Neoplatonists : " You believe, Plot- 
inus, in an absolutely Good Being. Do you believe that it de- 
sires to shed forth its goodness on all ? " " Of course," they 
would have answered, " on those who seek for it, on the philo- 
sopher." 

" But not, it seems, Plotinus, on the herd, the brutal, ignorant 
mass, wallowing in those foul crimes above which you have 
risen ? " And at that question there would have been not a little 
hesitation." These brutes in human form, these souls wallowing in 
earthly mire, could hardly, in the Neoplatonists' eyes, be objects 
of the Divine desire. 



368 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

" Then this Absolute Good, you say, Plotinus, has no relation 
with them, no care to raise them. In fact, it cannot raise them, 
because they have nothing in common with it, Is that your no- 
tion ? " And the Neoplatonist would have, on the whole, al- 
lowed that argument. And if Clement had answered, that such 
was not his notion of Goodness, or of a Good Being, and that 
therefore the goodness of their Absolute Good, careless of the 
degradation and misery around it, must be something very dif- 
ferent from his notions of human goodness ; the Neoplatonists 
would have answered — indeed they did answer — "After all, why 
not? Why should the Absolute Goodness be like our human 
goodness ? " This is Plotinus's own belief. It is a question 
with him, it was still more a question with those who came after 
him, whether virtues could be predicated of the Divine nature ; 
courage, for instance, of one who had nothing to fear ; self-re- 
straint, of one who had nothing to desire ? And thus, by setting 
up a different standard of morality for the divine and for the 
human, Plotinus gradually arrives at the conclusion, that virtue 
is not the end, but the means ; not the Divine nature itself, as 
the Christian schools held, but only the purgative process by 
which man was to ascend into heaven, and which was necessary 
to arrive at that nature — that nature itself being— what ? 

And how to answer that last question, was the abysmal prob- 
lem of the whole of Neoplatonic philosophy, in searching for 
which it wearied itself out, generation after generation, till tired 
equally of seeking and of speaking, it fairly laid down and died. 
In proportion as it refused to acknowledge a common divine 
nature with the degraded mass, it deserted its first healthy in- 
stinct, which told it that the spiritual world is identical with the 
moral world, with right, love, justice ; it tried to find new defi- 
nitions for the spiritual ; it conceived it to be identical with the 
intellectual. That did not satisfy its heart. It had to repeople 
the spiritual world, which it had emptied of its proper denizens, 
with ghosts ; to reinvent the old dsemonologies and polytheisms, 
— from thence to descend into lower depths, of which we will 
speak hereafter. 

But in the meanwhile we must look at another quarrel which 
arose between the two twin schools of Alexandria. The Neo- 
platonists said, that there is a divine element in man. The 
Christian philosophers assented fervently, and raised the old 
disagreeable question : " Is it in every man ? In the publicans 
and harlots as well as in the philosophers ? We say that it is." 
And there again the Neoplatonist finds it over hard to assent to 
a doctrine, equally contrary to outward appearance, and galling 
to Pharisaic pride ; and enters into a hundred honest self-puz- 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 369 

zles and self-contradictions, which seem to justify him at last in 
saying, " No." It is in the philosopher, who is ready by nature, 
as Plotinus has it, and as it were, furnished with wings, and not 
needing to sever himself from matter like the rest, but disposed 
already to ascend to that which is above. And in a degree too, 
it is in the " lover," who, according to Plotinus, has a certain 
innate recollection of beauty, and hovers round it, and desires it, 
wherever he sees it. Him you may raise to the apprehension 
of the one incorporeal Beauty, by teaching him to separate 
beauty from the various objects in which it appears scattered and 
divided. And it is even in the third class, the lowest of whom 
there is hope, namely the musical man, capable of being passively 
affected by beauty, without having any active appetite for it ; 
the sentimentalist, in short, as we should call him nowadays. 

But for the herd, Plotinus cannot say that there is any thing 
divine in them. And thus it gradually comes out in all Neo- 
platonist writings which I have yet examined, that the Divine 
only exists in a man, in proportion as he is conscious of its exist- 
ence in him. From which spring two conceptions of the Divine 
in man. First, is it a part of him, if it is dependent for its ex- 
istence on his consciousness of it? Or is it, as Philo, Plutarch, 
Marcus Aurelius would have held, as the Christians held, some- 
thing independent of him, without him, a Logos or Word speak- 
ing to his reason and conscience ? With this question Plotinus 
grapples, earnestly, shrewdly, fairly. If you wish to see how he 
does it, you should read the fourth and fifth books of the sixth 
JSnnead, especially if you be lucky enough to light on a copy of 
that rare book, Taylor's faithful though crabbed translation. 

Not that the result of his search is altogether satisfactory. He 
enters into subtle and severe disquisitions concerning soul. 
Whether it is one, or many. How it can be both one and many. 
He has the strongest perception that, to use the noble saying of 
the Germans, K Time and Space are no gods." He sees clearly 
that the soul, and the whole unseen world of truly existing being, 
is independent of time and space : and yet, after he has wrestled 
with the two Titans, through page after page, and apparently 
conquered them, they slip in again unawares into the battle-field, 
the moment his back is turned. He denies that the one Reason 
has parts — it must exist as a whole wheresoever it exists : and 
yet he cannot express the relation of the individual soul to it, 
but by saying that we are parts of it ; or that each thing, clown 
to the lowest, receives as much soul as it is capable of possessing. 
Ritter has worked out at length, though in a somewhat dry and 
lifeless way, the hundred contradictions of this kind which you 
meet in Plotinus ; contradictions which I suspect to be insepara- 

16* 



370 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

ble from any philosophy starting from his grounds. Is he not 
looking for the spiritual in a region where it does not exist ; in 
the region of logical conceptions, and abstractions, which are not 
realities, but only, after all, symbols of our own, whereby we ex- 
press to ourselves the processes of our own brain ? May not his 
Christian contemporaries have been nearer scientific truth, as well 
as nearer the common sense, and practical belief of mankind, in 
holding that that which is spiritual is personal, and can only be 
seen or conceived of as residing in persons ; and that that which is 
personal is moral, and has to do, not with abstractions of the intel- 
lect, but with right and wrong, love and hate, and all which, in the 
common instincts of men, involves a free will, a free judgment, a 
free responsibility and desert? And that, therefore, if there were 
a Spirit, a Daemonic Element, an universal Reason, a Logos, a 
Divine Element, closely connected with man, that our Reason, 
that one Divine Element, must be a person also ? At least, so 
strong was the instinct of even the Heathen schools in this direc- 
tion, that the followers of Plotinus had to fill up the void which 
yawned between man and the invisible things after which he 
yearned, by reviving the whole old Pagan Polytheism, and add- 
ing to it a Daemonology borrowed partly from the Chaldees, and 
partly from the Jewish rabbis, which formed a descending chain 
of persons, downward from the highest Deities to heroes, and to 
the guardian angel of each man ; the meed of the philosopher 
being, that by self-culture and self-restraint he could rise above 
the tutelage of some lower and more earthly daemon, and be- 
come the pupil of a God, and finally, a God himself. 

These contradictions need not lower the great Father of Neo- 
platonism in our eyes as a moral being. All accounts of him seem 
to prove him to have been what Apollo, in a lengthy oracle, 
declared him to have been, " good and gentle, and benignant ex- 
ceedingly, and pleasant in all his conversation." He gave good 
advice about earthly matters, was a faithful steward of moneys 
deposited with him, a guardian of widows and orphans, a righte- 
ous and loving man. In his practical life, the ascetic and gnostic 
element comes out strongly enough. The body, with him, was 
not evil, neither was it good ; it was simply nothing — why care 
about it ? He would have no portrait taken of his person ; " It 
was humiliating enough to be obliged to carry a shadow about 
with him, without having a shadow made of that shadow." He 
refused animal food, abstained from baths, declined medicine in 
his last illness, and so died, about 200 A. D. 

It is in his followers, as one generally sees in such cases, that 
the weakness of his conceptions comes out. Plotinus was an 
earnest thinker, slavishly enough reverencing the opinion of 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 371 

Plato, whom he quotes as an infallible oracle, with a " He says," 
as if there were but one he in the universe : but he tried hon- 
estly to develop Plato, or what he conceived to be Plato, on the 
method which Plato had laid down. His dialectic is far superior, 
both in quantity and in quality, to that of those who come after 
him. He is a seeker. His followers are not. The great work 
which marks the second stage of his school is not an inquiry, but 
a justification, not only of the Egyptian, but of all possible theur- 
gies and superstitions; perhaps the best attempt of the kind 
which the world has ever seen ; that which marks the third is a 
mere cloud-castle, and inverted pyramid, not of speculation but 
of dogmatic assertion, patched together from all accessible rags 
and bones of the dead world. Some here will, perhaps, guess 
from my rough descriptions, that I speak of Iamblichus and 
Proclus. 

Whether or not Iamblichus wrote the famous work usually 
attributed to him, which describes itself as the letter of Abam- 
non the Teacher to Porphyry, he became the head of that school 
of Neoplatonists who fell back on theurgy and magic, and utterly 
swallowed up the more rational, though more hopeless, school of 
Porphyry. Not that Porphyry, too, with all his dislike of magic 
and the vulgar superstitions — a dislike intimately connected with 
his loudly expressed dislike of the common herd, and therefore 
of Christianity, as a religion for the common herd — did not be- 
lieve a fact or two, which looks to us, nowadays, somewhat un- 
philosophical. From him we learn that one Ammonius, trying 
to crush Plotinus by magic arts, had his weapons so completely 
turned against himself, that all his limbs were contracted. From 
him we learn that Plotinus, having summoned in the temple of 
Isis his familiar spirit, a god, and not a mere daemon, appeared. 
He writes sensibly however, enough, to one Anebos, an Egyp- 
tian priest, stating his doubts as to the popular notions of the 
Gods, as beings subject to human passions and vices, and of 
theurgy and magic, as material means of compelling them to ap- 
pear, or alluring them to favour man. The answer of Abamnon, 
Anebos, Iamblichus, or whoever the real author may have been, 
is worthy of perusal by every metaphysical student, as a curious 
phase of thought, not confined to that time, but ri^je, under some 
shape or other, in every age of the world's history, and in this as 
much as in any. There are many passages full of eloquence, 
many more full of true and noble thought : but, on the whole, it 
is the sewing of new cloth into an old garment ; the attempt to 
suit the old superstition to the new one, by eclectically picking 
and choosing, and special pleading, on both sides ; but the rent 
is only made worse. There is no base superstition which Abam- 



372 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

non does not unconsciously justify. And yet he is rapidly losing 
sight of the real, eternal human germs of truth round which 
those superstitions clustered, and is really further from truth and 
reason than old Homer or Hesiod, because further from the 
simple, universal, every day facts, and relations, and duties of 
man, which are, after all, among the most mysterious, and also 
among the most sacred objects which man can contemplate. 

It was not wonderful, however, that Neoplatonism took the 
course it did. Spirit, they felt rightly, was meant to rule matter ; 
it was to be freed from matter only for that very purpose. No 
one could well deny that. The philosopher, as he rose, and be- 
came, according to Plotinus, a god, or at least approached toward 
them, must partake of some mysterious and transcendental power. 
No one could well deny that conclusion, granting the premiss. 
But of what power ? What had he to show as the result of his 
intimate communion with an unseen Being? The Christian 
schools, who held that the spiritual is the moral, answered ac- 
cordingly. He must show righteousness, and love, and peace in 
a Holy Spirit. That is the likeness of God. In proportion as 
a man has them, he is partaker of a Divine nature. He can 
rise no higher, and he needs no more. Platonists had said, — 
No, that is only virtue ; and virtue is the means, not the end. 
We want proof of having something above that ; something more 
than any man of the herd, any Christian slave, can perform ; 
something above nature ; portents and wonders. So they set to 
work to perform wonders ; and succeeded, I suppose, more or 
less. For now one enters into a whole fairy land of those very 
phenomena which are puzzling us so nowadays — ecstasy, clair- 
voyance, insensibility to pain, cures produced by the effect of 
what we now call mesmerism. They are all there, these modern 
puzzles, in those old books of the long bygone seekers for wis- 
dom. It makes us love them, while it saddens us to see that 
their difficulties were the same as ours, and that there is nothing 
new under the sun. Of course, a great deal of it all was "im- 
agination." But the question then, as now, is, what is this won- 
der-working imagination ? — unless the word be used as a mere 
euphemism for lying, which really, in many cases, is hardly fair. 
We cannot wonder at the old Neoplatonists for attributing these 
strange phenomena to spiritual influence, when we see some who 
ought to know better doing the same thing now ; and others, 
who more wisely believe them to be strictly physical and ner- 
vous, so utterly unable to give reasons for them, that they feel 
it expedient to ignore them for awhile, till they know more 
about those physical phenomena which can be put under some 
sort of classification, and attributed to some sort of inductive law. 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 373 

But again. These ecstasies, cures, and so forth, brought them 
rapidly back to the old priestcrafts. The Egyptian priests, the 
Babylonian and Jewish sorcerers, had practised all this as a trade 
for ages, and reduced it to an art. It was by sleeping in the 
temples of the deities, after due mesmeric manipulations, that 
cures were even then effected. Surely the old priests were the 
people to whom to go for information. The old philosophers of 
Greece were venerable. How much more those of the East, in 
comparison with whom the Greeks were children ? Besides, if 
these daemons and deities were so near them, might it not be 
possible to behold them ? They seemed to have given up caring 
much for the world and its course — 

" Effugerant adytis templisque relictis 
Di quibus imperium steterat." 

The old priests used to make them appear — perhaps they might 
do it again. And if spirit could act directly and preternaturally 
on matter, in spite of the laws of matter, perhaps matter might 
act on spirit. After all, were matter and spirit so absolutely 
different ? Was not spirit some sort of pervading essence, some 
subtle ethereal fluid, differing from matter principally in being 
less gross and dense ? This was the point to which they went 
down rapidly enough ; the point to which all philosophies, I 
firmly believe, will descend, which do not keep in sight that the 
spiritual means the moral. In trying to make it mean exclusively 
the intellectual, they will degrade it to mean the merely logical 
and abstract ; and when that is found to be a barren and lifeless 
phantom, a mere projection of the human brain, attributing 
reality to mere conceptions and names, and confusing the subject 
with the object, as logicians say truly the Neoplatonists did, then, 
in despair, the school will try to make the spiritual something 
real, or, at least, something conceivable, by reinvesting it with 
the properties of matter, and talking of it as if it were some 
manner of gas, or heat, or electricity, or force, pervading time 
and space, conditioned by the accidents of brute matter, and a 
part of that nature which is born to die. 

The culmination of all this confusion we see in Proclus. The 
unfortunate Hypatia, who is the most important personage be- 
tween him and lamblichus, has left no writings to our times ; we 
can only judge of her doctrine by that of her instructors and her 
pupils. Proclus was taught by the men who had heard her lec- 
ture ; and the golden chain of the Platonic succession descended 
from her to him. His throne, however, was at Athens, not at 
Alexandria. After the murder of the maiden philosopher, Neo- 
platonism prudently retired to Greece. But Proclus is so essen- 



374 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

tially the child of the Alexandrian school, that we cannot pass 
him over. Indeed, according to M. Cousin, as I am credibly 
informed, he is the Greek philosopher ; the flower and crown of 
all its schools ; in whom, says the learned Frenchman, " are 
combined, and from whom shine forth, in no irregular or uncer- 
tain rays, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Plotinus, 
Porphyry, and Iamblichus ; " and who " had so comprehended 
all religions in his mind, and paid them such equal reverence, 
that he was, as it were, the priest of the whole universe ! " 

I have not the honour of knowing much of M. Cousin's works. 
I never came across them but on one small matter of fact, and 
on that I found him copying at second hand an anachronism 
which one would have conceived palpable to any reader of the 
original authorities. This is all I know of him, saving these his 
raptures over Proclus, of which I have quoted only a small por- 
tion, and of which I can only say, in Mr. Thomas Carlyle's 
words, " What things men will worship, in their extreme need ! " 
Other moderns, however, have expressed their admiration of 
Proclus ; and, no doubt, many neat sayings may be found in him 
(for after all he was a Greek) which will be both pleasing and 
useful to those who consider philosophic method to consist in 
putting forth strings of brilliant apophthegms, careless about 
either their consistency or coherence : but of the method of Plato 
or Aristotle, any more than of that of Kant or Mill, you will 
find nothing in him. He seems to my simplicity to be at once 
the most timid and servile of commentators, and the most cloudy 
of declaimers. He can rave symbolism like Jacob Bohmen ; 
but without an atom of his originality and earnestness. He can 
develop an inverted pyramid of daemon ology, like Father New- 
man himself ; but without an atom of his art, his knowledge of 
human cravings. He combines all schools, truly, Chaldee and 
Egyptian as well, as Greek: but only scraps from their mum- 
mies, drops from their quintessences, which satisfy the heart and 
conscience as little as they do the logical faculties. His Greek 
gods and heroes, even his Alcibiades and Socrates, are " ideas ; " 
that is, symbols of certain notions or qualities; their flesh and 
bones, their heart and brain, have been distilled away, till noth- 
ing is left but a word,' a notion, which may patch a hole in his 
huge heaven-and-earth-embracing system. He, too, is a com- 
mentator and a dedueer ; all has been discovered ; and he tries 
to discover nothing more. Those who followed him seem to 
have commented on his comments. With him Neoplatonism 
properly ends. Is its last utterance a culmination, or a fall ? 
Have the Titans scaled heaven, or died of old age, " exhibiting,'' 
as Gibbon says of them, " a deplorable instance of the senility 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 375 

of the human mind ? " Read Proclus, and judge for yourselves : 
but first contrive to finish every thing else you have to do which 
can possibly be useful to any human being. Life is short, and • 
Art — at least the art of obtaining practical guidance from the 
last of the Alexandrians — very long. 

And yet — if Proclus and his school became gradually unfaith- 
ful to the great root idea of their philosophy, we must not imitate 
them. "We must not believe that the last of the Alexandrians 
was under no divine teaching, because he had be-systemed him- 
self into confused notions of what that teaching was like. Yes, 
there was good in poor old Proclus ; and it too came from the 
only source whence all good comes. Were there no good in 
him, I could not laugh at him as I have done ; I could only hate 
him. There are moments when he rises above his theories ; 
moments when he recurs in spirit, if not in the letter, to the 
faith of Homer, almost to the faith of Philo. Whether these 
are the passages of his which his modern admirers prize most, I 
cannot tell. I should fancy not : nevertheless I will read you 
one of them. 

He is about to commence his discourses on the Parmenides, 
that book in which we generally now consider that Plato has 
been most untrue to himself, and fallen from his usual inductive 
method to the ground of a mere a priori theorizer — and yet of 
which Proclus is reported to have said, and, I should conceive, 
said honestly, that if it, the Timaeus, and the Orphic fragments 
were preserved, he did not care whether every other book on 
earth were destroyed. But how does he commence ? — 

" I pray to all the gods and goddesses to guide my reason in 
the speculation which lies before me, and having kindled in me 
the pure light of truth, to direct my mind upward to the very 
knowledge of the things which are, and to open the doors of my 
soul to receive the divine guidance of Plato, and, having directed 
my knowledge into the very brightness of being, to withdraw 
me from the various forms of opinion, from the apparent wisdom, 
from the wandering about things which do not exist, by that purest 
intellectual exercise about the things which do exist, whereby 
alone the eye of the soul is nourished and brightened, as Socrates 
says in the Phcedrus ; and that the Noetic Gods will give to me 
the perfect reason, and the Noeric Gods the power which leads 
up to this, and that the rulers of the Universe above the heaven 
will impart to me an energy unshaken by material notions and 
emancipated from them, and those to whom the world is given as 
their dominion a winged life, and the angelic choirs a true mani- 
festation of divine things, and the good daemons the fulness of 
the inspiration which comes from the Gods, and the heroes a 



376 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

grand, and venerable, and lofty fixedness of mind, and the whole 
divine race together a perfect preparation for sharing in Plato's 
■ most mystical and far-seeing speculations, which he declares to 
us himself in the Parmenides with the profundity befitting such 
topics, but which he (i. e. his master Syrianus) completed by his 
most pure and luminous apprehensions, who did most truly share 
the Platonic feast, and was the medium for transmitting the 
divine truth, the guide in our speculations, and the hierophant 
of these divine words ; who, as I think, came down as a type 
of philosophy, to do good to the souls that are here, in place of 
idols, sacrifices, and the whole mystery of purification, a leader 
of salvation to the men who are now and who shall be hereafter. 
And may the whole band of those who are above us be pro- 
pitious ; and may the whole force which they supply be at hand, 
kindling before us that light which, proceeding from them, may 
guide us to them." 

Surely this is an interesting document. The last Pagan Greek 
prayer, I believe, which we have on record ; the death-wail of 
the old world — not without a touch of melody. One cannot alto- 
gether admire the style ; it is inflated, pedantic, written, I fear, 
with a considerable consciousness that he was saying the right 
thing and in the very finest way : but still it is a prayer. A cry 
for light — by no means, certainly, like that noble one in Tenny- 
son's In Memoriam : — 

So runs my dream. But what am I? 

An infant crying in the night ; 

An infant crying for the light; 
And with no language but a cry. 

Yet he asks for light : perhaps he had settled already for himself 
— like too many more of us — what sort of light he chose to 
have : but still the eye is turned upward to the sun, not inward 
in conceited fancy that self is its own illumination. He asks : 
surely not in vain. There was light to be had for asking. That 
prayer certainly was not answered in the letter : it may have 
been ere now in the spirit. And yet it is a sad prayer enough. 
Poor old man, and poor old philosophy ! 

This he and his teachers had gained by despising the simpler 
and yet far profounder doctrine of the Christian schools, that the 
Logos, the Divine Teacher in Avhom both Christians and Heathens 
believed, was the very archetype of men, and that he had proved 
that fact by being made flesh, and dwelling bodily among them, 
that they might behold His glory, full of grace and truth, and 
see that it was at once the perfection of man and the perfection 
of God : that that which was most divine was most human, and 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 377 

that which was most human, most divine. That was the out- 
come of their metaphysic, that they had found the Absolute One ; 
because One existed in whom the apparent antagonism between 
that which is eternally and that which becomes in time, between 
the ideal and the actual, between the spiritual and the material, 
in a word, between God and man, w r as explained and reconciled 
for ever. 

And Proclus's prayer, on the other hand, was the outcome of 
the Neoplatonists' metaphysic, the end of all their search after 
the One, the Indivisible, the Absolute, this cry to all manner of 
innumerable phantoms, ghosts of ideas, ghosts of traditions, 
neither things nor persons, but thoughts, to give the philosopher 
each something or other, according to the nature of each. Not 
that he very clearly defines what each is to give him : but still, 
he feels himself in want of all manner of things, and it is as well 
to have as many friends at court as possible, Noetic Gods, Noeric 
Gods, rulers, angels, dsemons, heroes — to enable him to do what ? 
To understand Plato's most mystical and far-seeing speculations. 
The Eternal Nous, the Intellectual Teacher, has vanished further 
and further off: further off still some dim vision of a supreme 
Goodness. Infinite spaces above that looms through the mist of 
the abyss a Primaeval One. But even that has a predicate, for 
it is one ; it is not pure essence. Must there not be something 
beyond that again, which is not even one, but is nameless, incon- 
ceivable, absolute ? What an abyss ! How shall the human 
mind find any thing whereon to rest, in the vast nowhere between 
it and the object of its search ? The search after the One issues 
in a wail to the innumerable; and kind gods, angels, and heroes, 
not human indeed, but still conceivable enough to satisfy at least 
the imagination, step in to fill the void, as they have done since, 
and may do again ; and so as Mr. Carlyle has it, " the bottomless 
pit got roofed over," as it may be again ere long. 

Are we then to say, that Neoplatonism was a failure ? That 
Alexandria, during four centuries of profound and earnest thought, 
added nothing ? Heaven forbid that we should say so of a 
philosophy which has exercised on European thought, at the 
crisis of its noblest life and action, an influence as great as did 
the Aristotelian system during the middle ages. We must never 
forget, that during the two centuries which commence with the 
fall of Constantinople, and end with our civil wars, not merely 
almost all great thinkers, but courtiers, statesmen, warriors, poets, 
were more or less Neoplatonists. The Greek grammarians, who 
migrated into Italy, brought with them the works of Plotinus, 
Iamblichus, and Proclus ; and their gorgeous reveries were wel- 
comed eagerly by the European mind, just revelling in the free 



378 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

thought of youthful manhood. And yet the Alexandrian impo- 
tence for any practical and social purposes was to be manifested, 
as utterly as it was in Alexandria, or in Athens of old. Ficinus 
and Picus of Mirandola worked no deliverance, either for Italian 
morals or polity, at a time when such deliverance was needed 
bitterly enough. Neoplatonism was petted by luxurious and 
heathen popes, as an elegant play of the cultivated fancy, which 
could do their real power, their practical system, neither good nor 
harm. And one cannot help feeling, while reading the magnifi- 
cent oration on Supra-sensual Love, which Castiglione, in his 
admirable book The Courtier, puts into the mouth of the profli- 
gate Bembo, how near mysticism may lie not merely to dilettant- 
ism or to Pharisaism, but to sensuality itself. But in England, 
during Elizabeth's reign, the practical weakness of Neoplatonism 
was compensated by the noble practical life which men were 
compelled to live in those great times ; by the strong hold which 
they had of the ideas of family and national life, of law and per- 
sonal faith. And I cannot but believe it to have been a mighty 
gain to such men as Sidney, Raleigh, and Spenser, that they had 
drunk, however slightly, of the wells of Proclus and Plotinus. 
One cannot read Spenser's Fairy Queen, above all, his Garden 
of Adonis, and his cantos on Mutability, without feeling that his 
Neoplatonism must have kept him safe from many a dark 
eschatological superstition, many a narrow and bitter dogmatism, 
which was even then tormenting the English mind, and must 
have helped to give him altogether a freer and more loving con- 
ception, if not a consistent or accurate one, of the wondrous har- 
mony of that mysterious analogy between the physical and the 
spiritual, which alone makes poetry (and I had almost said 
philosophy also) possible, and have taught him to behold alike in 
suns and planets, in flowers and insects, in man and in beings 
higher than man, one glorious order of love and wisdom, linking 
them all to Him from whom they all proceed, rays from his cloud- 
less sunlight, mirrors of his eternal glory. 

But as the Elizabethan age, exhausted by its own fertility, 
gave place to the Caroline, Neoplatonism ran through much the 
same changes. It was good for us, after all, that the plain 
strength of the puritans, unphilosophical as they were, swept it 
away. One feels in reading the later Neoplatonists, Henry 
More, Smith, even Cud worth, (valuable as he is,) that the old 
accursed distinction between the philosopher, the scholar, the illu- 
minate, and the plain righteous man, was growing up again very 
fast. The school from which the Religio Medici issued, was not 
likely to make any bad men good, or any foolish men wise. 

Besides, as long as men were continuing to quote poor old 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 379 

Proclus as an irrefragable authority, and believing that he, for- 
sooth, represented the sense of Plato, the new-born Baconian 
Philosophy had but little chance in the world. Bacon had been 
right years before in his dislike of Platonism, though he was 
unjust to Plato himself. It was Proclus whom he was really 
reviling ; Proclus as Plato's commentator and representative. 
The lion had for once got into the ass's skin, and was treated 
accordingly. The true Platonic method, that dialectic which the 
Alexandrians gradually abandoned, remains yet to be tried, both 
in England and in Germany ; and I am much mistaken, if, 
when fairly used, it be not found the ally, not the enemy, of the 
Baconian philosophy ; in fact, the inductive method applied to 
words, as the expressions of Metaphysic Laws, instead of to 
natural phenomena, as the expressions of Physical ones. If you 
wish to see the highest instances of this method, read Plato him- 
self, not Proclus. If you wish to see how the same method can 
be applied to Christian truth, read the dialectic passages in 
Augustine's Confessions. Whether or not you shall agree with 
their conclusions, you will not be likely, if you have a truly sci- 
entific habit of mind, to complain that they want either pro- 
fundity, severity, or simplicity. 

So concludes the history of one of the Alexandrian schools of 
Metaphysic. What was the fate of the other is a subject which 
I must postpone to my next Lecture. 



LECTURE IY. 

THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT. 

I tried to point out, in my last Lecture, the causes which led 
to the decay of the Pagan metaphysic of Alexandria. We have 
now to consider the fate of the Christian school. 

You may have remarked that I have said little or nothing 
about the positive dogmas of Clement, Origen, and their disci- 
ples : but have only brought out the especial points of departure 
between them and the Heathens. My reason for so doing was 
twofold : first, I could not have examined them without entering 
on controversial ground ; next, I am very desirous to excite some 
of my hearers, at least, to examine these questions for them- 
selves. 

I entreat them not to listen to the hasty sneer to which many 
of late have given way, that the Alexandrian divines were mere 



380 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

mystics, who corrupted Christianity by an admixture of Oriental 
and Greek thought. My own belief is that they expanded and 
corroborated Christianity, in spite of great errors and defects on 
certain points, far more than they corrupted it ; that they pre- 
sented it to the minds of cultivated and scientific men in the only 
form in which it would have satisfied their philosophic aspira- 
tions, and yet contrived, with wonderful wisdom, to ground their 
philosophy on the very same truths which they taught to the 
meanest slaves, and to appeal in the philosophers to the same 
inward faculty to which they appealed in the slave ; namely, to 
that inward eye, that moral sense and reason, whereby each and 
every man can, if he will, "judge of himself that which is right." 
I boldly say that I believe the^ Alexandrian Christians to have 
made the best, perhaps the only, attempt yet made by men, to 
proclaim a true world-philosophy ; whereby I mean a philosophy 
common to all races, ranks, and intellects, embracing the whole 
phenomena of humanity, and not an arbitrarily small portion of 
them, and capable of being understood and appreciated by every 
human being from the highest to the lowest. And when you 
hear of a system of reserve in teaching, a disciplines arcani, of 
an esoteric and exoteric, an inner and outer school, among these 
men, you must not be frightened at the words, as if they spoke 
of priestcraft, or an intellectual aristocracy, who kept the kernel 
of the nut for themselves, and gave the husks to the mob. It 
was not so with the Christian schools ; it was . so with the Hea- 
then ones. The Heathens were content that the mob, the herd, 
should have the husks. Their avowed intention and wish was 
to leave the herd, as they called them, in the mere outward 
observance of the old idolatries, while they themselves, the culti- 
vated philosophers, had the monopoly of those deeper spiritual 
truths which were contained under the old superstitions, and 
were too sacred to be profaned by the vulgar eyes. The Chris- 
tian method was the exact opposite. They boldly called those 
vulgar eyes to enter into the very holy of holies, and there gaze 
on the very deepest root-ideas of their philosophy. They owned 
no ground for their own speculations which was not common to 
the harlots and the slaves around. And this was what enabled 
them to do this ; this was what brought on them the charge of 
demagogism, the hatred of philosophers, the persecution of prin- 
ces ; — that their ground was a moral ground, and not a merely 
intellectual one ; that they started, not from any notions of the 
understanding, but from the inward conscience, that truly pure 
Reason in which the intellectual and the moral spheres are united, 
which they believed to exist, however dimmed or crushed, in 
every human being, capable of being awakened, purified, and 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 381 

raised up to a noble and heroic life. They concealed nothing 
moral from their disciples : only they forbade them to meddle 
with intellectual matters, before they had had a regular intellec- 
tual training, The witnesses of reason and conscience were suf- 
ficient guides for all men, and at them the many might well stop 
short. The teacher only needed to proceed further, not into a 
higher region, but into a lower one, namely, into the region of 
the logical understanding, and there make deductions from, and 
illustrations of, those higher truths which he held in common with 
every slave, and held on the same ground as they. 

And the consequence of this method of philosophizing was 
patent. They were enabled to produce, in the lives of millions, 
generation after generation, a more immense moral improvement 
than the world had ever seen before. Their disciples did actu- 
ally become righteous and good men, just in proportion as they 
were true to the lessons they learnt. They did, for centuries, 
work a distinct and palpable deliverance on the earth ; while all 
the solemn and earnest meditation of the Neoplatonists, however 
good or true, worked no deliverance whatsoever. Plotinus longed 
at one time to make a practical attempt. He asked the Emperor 
Gallienus, his patron, to rebuild for him a city in Campania ; 
to allow him to call it Platonopolis, and put it into the hands of 
him and his disciples, that they might there realize Plato's ideal 
republic. Luckily for the reputation of Neoplatonism, the scheme 
was swamped by the courtiers of Gallienus, and the earth was 
saved the sad and ludicrous sight of a realized Laputa ; probably 
a very quarrelsome one. ' That was his highest practical concep- 
tion : the foundation of a new society : not the regeneration of 
society as it existed. 

That work was left for the Christian schools ; and up to a cer- 
tain point they performed it. They made men good. This was 
the test, which of the schools was in the right : this was the test, 
which of the two had hold of the eternal roots of metaphysic. 
Cicero says, that he had learnt more philosophy from the Laws 
of the Twelve Tables than from all the Greeks. Clemens and 
his school might have said the same of the Hebrew Ten Com- 
mandments and Jewish Law, which are so marvellously analo- 
gous to the old Roman laws founded, as they are, on the belief 
in a Supreme Being, a Jupiter — literally a Heavenly Father — 
who is the source and the sanction of law ; of whose justice man's 
justice is the pattern ; who is the avenger of crimes against mar- 
riage, property, life ; on whom depends the sanctity of an oath. 
And so, to compare great things with small, there was a truly 
practical human element here in the Christian teaching ; purely 
ethical and metaphysical, and yet palpable to the simplest and 



382 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

lowest, which gave to it a regenerating force which the highest 
efforts of Neoplatonism could never attain. 

And yet Alexandrian Christianity, notoriously enough, rotted 
away, and perished hideously. Most true. But what if the 
causes of its decay and death were owing to its being untrue to 
itself? 

I do not say that they had no excuses for being untrue to their 
own faith. We are not here to judge them. That peculiar 
subtlety of mind, which rendered the Alexandrians the great 
thinkers of the then world, had with Christians, as well as Hea- 
thens, the effect of alluring them away from practice to specula- 
tion. The Christian school, as was to be expected from the 
moral ground of their philosophy, yielded to it far more slowly 
than the Heathen, but they did yield, and especially after they 
had conquered and expelled the Heathen school. Moreover, 
the long battle with the Heathen school had stirred up in them 
habits of exclusiveness, of denunciation ; the spirit which cannot 
assert a fact without dogmatizing rashly and harshly on the conse- 
quences of denying that fact. Their minds assumed a permanent 
habit of combativeness. Having no more Heathens to fight, they 
began fighting each other, excommunicating each other ; denying 
to all who differed from them any share of that light, to claim which 
for all men had been the very ground of their philosophy. Not 
that they would have refused the Logos to all men in words. 
They would have cursed a man for denying the existence of the 
Logos in every man ; but they would have equally cursed him 
for acting on his existence in practice, and treating the heretic 
as one who had that within him to which a preacher might ap-* 
peal. Thus they became Dogmatists ; that is, men who assert a 
truth so fiercely, as to forget that a truth is meant to be used, and 
not merely asserted — if, indeed, the fierce assertion of a truth in 
frail man is not generally a sign of some secret doubt of it, and in 
inverse proportion to his practical living faith in it : just as he who 
is always telling you that he is a man, is not the most likely to 
behave like a man. And why did this befall them ? Because 
they forgot practically that the light proceeded from a Person. 
They could argue over notions and dogmas deduced from the 
notion of his personality : but they were shut up in those notions ; 
they had forgotten that if He was a Person, his eye was on them, 
his rule and kingdom within them ; and that if He was a Per- 
son, He had a character, and that that character was a righteous 
and a loving character ; and therefore they were not ashamed, in 
defending these notions and dogmas about Him, to commit acts 
abhorrent to his character, to lie, to slander, to intrigue, to hate, 
even to murder, for the sake of what they madly called his 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 383 

glory : but which was really only their own glory, — the glory of their 
own dogmas ; of propositions and conclusions in their own brain, 
which, true or false, were equally heretical in their mouths, 
because they used them only as w T atchwords of division. Ortho- 
dox or unorthodox, they lost the knowledge of God, for they lost 
the knowledge of righteousness, and love, and peace. That Di- 
vine Logos, and theology as a whole, receded further and fur- 
ther aloft into abysmal heights, as it became a mere dreary sys- 
tem of dead scientific terms, having no practical bearing on their 
hearts and lives ; and then they, as the Neoplatonists had done 
before them, filled up the void by those dsemonologies, images, 
base Fetish worships, which made the Mohammedan invaders 
regard them, and I believe justly, as polytheists and idolaters, 
base as the pagan Arabs of the desert. 

I cannot but believe them, moreover, to have been untrue to 
the teaching of Clement and his school, in that coarse and mate- 
rialist admiration of celibacy which ruined Alexandrian society, 
as their dogmatic ferocity ruined Alexandrian thought. The 
Creed which taught them that in the person of the Incarnate 
Logos, that which was most divine had been proved to be most 
human, that which was most human had been proved to be most 
divine, ought surely to have given to them, as it has given to 
modern Europe, nobler, clearer, simpler views of the true rela- 
tion of the sexes. However, on this matter they did not see 
their way. Perhaps, in so debased an age, so profligate a world, 
as that out of which Christianity had risen, it was impossible to 
see the true beauty and sanctity of those primary bonds of hu- 
manity. And while the relation of the sexes was looked on in a 
wrong light, all other social relations were necessarily also mis- 
conceived. " The very ideas of family and national life," as it 
has been said, " those two divine roots of the Church, severed 
from which she is certain to wither away into that most cruel 
and most godless of spectres, a religious world, had perished in 
the East, from the evil influence of the universal practice of 
slave-holding, as well as from the degradation of that Jewish 
nation which had been for ages the great witness for these ideas ; 
and all classes, like their forefather Adam — like, indeed, the Old 
Adam — the selfish, cowardly, brute nature in every man and in 
every age — were shifting the blame of sin from their own con- 
sciences to human relationships and duties, and therein, to the 
God who had appointed them ; and saying, as of old, ' The 
woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the 
tree, and I did eat.' " 

Much as Christianity did, even in Egypt, for woman, by assert- 
ing her moral and spiritual equality with the man, there seems 



384 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

to have been no suspicion that she was the true complement of 
the man, not merely by softening him, but by strengthening him ; 
that true manhood can be no more developed without the influ- 
ence of the woman, than true womanhood without the influence 
of the man. There is no trace among the Egyptian celibates of 
that chivalrous woman-worship which our Gothic forefathers 
brought with them into the West, which shed a softening and 
ennobling light round the mediaeval convent-life, and warded off 
for centuries the worst effects of monasticism. Among the reli- 
gious of Egypt, the monk regarded the nun, the nun the monk, 
with dread and aversion ; while both looked on the married popu- 
lation of the opposite sex with a coarse contempt and disgust 
which is hardly credible, dicL not the foul records of it stand 
written to this day, in Rosweyde's extraordinary Vitce Patrum 
Eremiticorum ; no barren school of metaphysic, truly, for those 
who are philosophic enough to believe that all phenomena what- 
soever of the *human mind are worthy matter for scientific 
induction. 

And thus grew up in Egypt a monastic world, of such vastness 
that it was said to equal in number the laity. This produced, 
no doubt, an enormous increase in the actual amount of moral 
evil. But it produced three other effects, which were the ruin 
of Alexandria. First, a continually growing enervation and nu- 
merical decrease of the population ; next, a carelessness of, and 
contempt for, social and political life ! and lastly, a most brutal- 
izing effect on the lay population ; who, told that they were, and 
believing themselves to be, beings of a lower order, and living 
by a lower standard, sank down more and more generation after 
generation. They were of the world, and the ways o£ the world 
they must follow. Political life had no inherent sanctity or 
nobleness ; why act hoiily and nobly in it ? Family life had no 
inherent sanctity or nobleness ; why act hoiily and nobly in it, 
either, if there were no holy, noble, and divine principle or 
ground for it ? And thus grew up, both in Egypt, Syria, and 
Byzantium, a chaos of profligacy and chicanery, in rulers and 
people, in the home and the market, in the theatre and the 
senate, such as the world has rarely seen before or since ; a 
chaos which reached its culmination in the seventh century, 
the age of Justinian and Theodora, perhaps the two most hideous 
sovereigns, worshipped by the most hideous empire of parasites 
and hypocrites, cowards and wantons, that ever insulted the 
long-suffering of a righteous God. 

But, for Alexandria at least, the cup was now full. In the 
year 640 the Alexandrians were tearing each other in pieces 
about some Jacobite and Melchite controversy, to me incompre- 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 3g5 

hensible, to you unimportant, because the fighters on both sides 
seem to have lost (as all parties do in their old age) the knowl- 
edge of what they were fighting for, and to have so bewildered 
the question with personal intrigues, spites, and quarrels, as to 
make it nearly as enigmatic as that famous contemporary war 
between the blue and green factions at Constantinople, which 
began by backing in the theatre, the charioteers who drove in 
blue dresses, against those who drove in green ; then went on to 
identify themselves each with one of the prevailing theological 
factions ; gradually developed, the one into an aristocratic, the 
other into a democratic, religious party ; and ended by a civil 
war in the streets of Constantinople, accompanied by the most 
horrible excesses, which had nearly, at one time, given up the 
city to the flames, and driven Justinian from his throne. 

In the midst of these Jacobite and Melchite controversies and 
riots, appeared before the city the armies of certain wild and 
unlettered Arab tribes. A short and fruitless struggle followed ; 
and, strange to say, a few months swept away from the face of 
the earth, not only the wealth, the commerce, the castles, and the 
liberty, but the philosophy and the Christianity of AJexandria ; 
crushed to powder, by one fearful blow, all that had been built 
up by Alexander and the Ptolemies, by Clement and the philoso- 
phers, and made void, to all appearance, nine hundred years of 
human toil. The people, having no real hold on their hereditary 
creed, accepted, by tens of thousands, that of the Mussulman 
invaders. The Christian remnant became tributaries ; and 
Alexandria dwindled from that time forth, into a petty sea-port 
town. 

And now — can we pass over this new metaphysical school of 
Alexandria ? Can we help inquiring, in what the strength of 
Islamism lay ? I, at least, cannot. I cannot help feeling that I 
am bound to examine in what relation the creed of Omar and 
Amrou stands to the Alexandrian speculations of five hundred 
years, and how it had power to sweep those speculations utterly 
from the Eastern mind. It is a difficult problem ; to me, as a 
Christian priest, a very awful problem. What more awful historic 
problem, than to see the lower creed destroying the higher ? to 
see God, as it were, undoing his own work, and repenting him 
that he had made man ? Awful indeed : but I can honestly say, 
that it is one from the investigation of which I have learnt— I 
cannot yet tell how T much : and Of this I am sure, that without 
that old Alexandrian philosophy, I should not have been able to 
do justice to Islam ; without Islam I should not have been able 
to find in that Alexandrian philosophy, an ever-living and prac- 
tical element. 

17 



386 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

I must, however, first entreat you to dismiss from your minds 
the vulgar notion that Mohammed was in anywise a bad man, or 
a conscious deceiver, pretending to work miracles, or to do things 
which he did not do. He sinned in one instance : but, as far as 
I can see, only in that one — I mean against what he must have 
known to be right. I allude to his relaxing in his own case those 
wise restrictions on polygamy which he had proclaimed. And 
yet, even in this case, the desire for a child may have been the 
true cause of his weakness. He did not see the whole truth, of 
course : but he was an infinitely better man than the men around ; 
perhaps, all in all, one of the best men of his day. Many here 
may have read Mr. Carlyle's vindication of Mohammed in his 
Lectures on Hero Worship ; to those who have not, I shall only 
say, that I entreat them to do so ; and that I assure them, that 
though I differ in many things utterly from Mr. Carlyle's infer- 
ences and deductions in that lecture, yet that I am convinced, 
from my own acquaintance with the original facts and documents, 
that the picture there drawn of Mohammed is a true and a just 
description of a much calumniated man. 

Now, what was the strength of Islam ? The common answer 
is, fanaticism and enthusiasm. To such answers I can only 
rejoin: Such terms must be defined before they are used, and 
we must be told what fanaticism and enthusiasm are. Till then 
I have no more a priori respect for a long word ending in -ism 
or -asm than I have for one ending in -ation or -ali ty. But while 
fanaticism and enthusiasm are being defined — a work more diffi- 
cult than is commonly fancied — we will go on to consider another 
answer. We are told that the strength of Islam lay in the hope 
of their sensuous Paradise and fear of their sensuous Gehenna. 
If so, this is the first and last time in the world's history that the 
strength of any large body of people — perhaps of any single man 
— lay in such a hope. History gives us innumerable proofs that 
such merely selfish motives are the parents of slavish impotence, 
of pedantry and conceit, of pious frauds, often of the most devilish 
cruelty : but, as far as my reading extends, of nothing better. 
Moreover, the Christian Greeks had much the same hopes on 
those points as the Mussulmans ; and similar causes should pro- 
duce similar effects : but those hopes gave them no strength. 
Besides, according to the Mussulmen's own account, this was not 
their great inspiring idea ; and it is absurd to consider the wild 
battle-cries of a few imaginative youths, about black-eyed and 
green-kerchiefed Houris calling to them from the skies, as rep- 
resenting the average feelings of a generation of sober and self- 
restraining men, who showed themselves actuated by far higher 
motives. 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 387 

Another answer, and one very popular now, is that the Mus- 
sulmans were strong, because they believed what they said ; and 
the Greeks weak, because they did not believe what they said. 
From this notion I shall appeal to another doctrine of the very 
same men who put it forth, and ask them, Can any man be strong 
by believing a lie ? Have you not told us, nobly enough, that 
every lie is by its nature rotten, doomed to death, certain to 
prove its own impotence, and be shattered to atoms the moment 
you try to use it, to bring it into rude actual contact with fact, 
and Nature, and the eternal laws ? Faith, to be strong, must be 
faith in something which is not one's self; faith in something 
eternal, something objective, something true, which would exist 
just as much though we and all the world disbelieved it. The 
strength of belief comes from that which is believed in ; if you 
separate it from that, it becomes a mere self-opinion, a sensation 
of positiveness ; and what sort of strength that will give history 
will tell us in the tragedies of the Jews who opposed Titus, of 
the rabble who followed Walter the Penniless to the Crusades, of 
the Munster Anabaptists, and many another sad page of human 
folly. It may give the fury of idiots ; not the deliberate might 
of valiant men. Let us pass this by, then ; believing that faith 
can only give strength where it is faith in something true and 
right : and go on to another answer almost as popular as the last. 

We are. told that the might of Islam lay in a certain innate 
force and savage virtue of the Arab character. If we have dis- 
covered this in the followers of Mohammed, they certainly had 
not discovered it in themselves. They spoke of themselves, 
rightly or wrongly, as men who had received a divine light, and 
that light a moral light, to teach them to love that which was 
good, and refuse that which was evil ; and to that divine light, 
they steadfastly and honestly attributed every right action of 
their lives. Most noble and affecting, in my eyes, is that answer 
of Saad's aged envoy to Yezdegird, King of Persia, when he 
reproached him with the past savagery and poverty of the Arabs. 
" Whatsoever thou hast said," answered the old man, " regard- 
ing the former condition of the Arabs is true. Their food ivas 
green lizards ; they buried their infant daughters alive ; nay, 
some of them feasted on dead carcases, and drank blood ; while 
others slew their kinsfolk, and thought themselves great and vali- 
ant, when by so doing, they became possessed of more property. 
They were clothed with hair garments, they knew not good from 
evil, and made no distinction between that which was lawful and 
unlawful. Such was our state ; but God in his mercy has sent 
us, by a holy prophet, a sacred volume, which teaches us the 
true faith." 



388 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

These words, I think, show us the secret of Islam. They are a 
just comment on that short and rugged chapter of the Koran which 
is said to have been Mohammed's first attempt either at prophecy 
or writing ; when, after long fasting and meditation among the 
desert hills, under the glorious eastern stars, he came down and 
told his good Kadijah that he had found a great thing, and that 
she must help him to write it down. And what was this which 
seemed to the unlettered camel-driver so priceless a treasure ? 
Not merely that God was one God — vast as that discovery was 
— but that he was a God " who showeth to man the thing which 
he knew not ; " a " most merciful God ; " a God, in a word, who 
could be trusted ; a God who would teach and strengthen ; a 
God, as he said, who would givejiim courage to set his face like 
a flint, and would put an answer in his mouth when his idolatrous 
countrymen cavilled and sneered at his message to them, to turn 
te from their idols of wood and stone, and become righteous men, 
as Abraham their forefather was righteous. 

"A God who showeth to man the thing which he knew not." 
That idea gave might to Islam, because it was a real idea, an 
eternal fact ; the result of a true insight into the character of 
God. And that idea alone, believe me, will give conquering 
might either to creed, philosophy, or heart of man. Each will 
be strong, each will endure, in proportion as it believes that God 
is one who shows to man the thing which he knew not : as it 
believes, in short, in that Logos of which Saint John wrote, that 
He was the light who lightens every man who comes into the 
world. 

In a word, the wild Koreish had discovered, more or less 
clearly, that end and object of all metaphysic whereof I have 
already spoken so often ; that eiternal and imperishable beauty 
for which Plato sought of old ; and had seen that its name was 
righteousness, and that it dwelt absolutely in an absolutely righte- 
ous person ; and moreover, that this person was no careless self- 
contented epicurean deity ; but that he was, as they loved to call 
him, the most merciful God ; that he cared for men ; that he 
desired to make men righteous. Of that they could not doubt. 
The fact was palpable, historic, present. To them , the degraded 
Koreish of the desert, who as they believed, and I think believed 
rightly, had fallen from the old Monotheism of their forefathers 
Abraham and Ismael, into the lowest fetishism, and with that 
into the lowest brutality and wretchedness ; to them — while they 
were making idols of wood and stone ; eating dead carcases ; and 
burying their daughters alive ; careless of chastity, of justice, of 
property ; sunk in unnatural crimes, dead in trespasses and sins ; 
hateful and hating one another — a man, one of their own people 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 389 

had come, saying, " I have a message from the one righteous 
God. His curse is on all this, for it is unlike Himself. He will 
have you righteous men, after the pattern of your forefather 
Abraham. Be that, and arise body, soul, and spirit, out of your 
savagery and brutishness. Then you shall be able to trample 
under foot the profligate idolaters, to sweep the Greek tyrants 
from the land which they have been oppressing for centuries, and 
to recover the East for its rightful heirs, the children of Abra- 
ham." Was this not, in every sense, a message from God ? I 
must deny the philosophy of Clement and Augustine ; I must 
deny my own conscience, my own reason ; I must outrage my 
own moral sense, and confess that I have no immutable standard 
of right, that I know no eternal source of right, if I deny it to 
have been one ; if I deny what seems to me the palpable historic 
fact, that those wild Koreish had in them a reason and a con- 
science, which could awaken to that message, and perceive its 
boundless beauty, its boundless importance, and that they did 
accept that message, and lived by it in proportion as they re- 
ceived it fully, such lives as no men in those times, and few in 
after times, have been able to live. If 1 feel, as I do feel, that 
Abubekr, Omar, Abu Obeidah, and Amrou, were better men 
than I am, I must throw away all that Philo — all that a Higher 
authority — has taught me : or I must attribute their lofty virtues 
to the one source of aU in man which is not selfishness, and 
fancy, and fury, and blindness as of the beasts which perish. 

Why, then, has Islamism become one of the most patent and 
complete failures upon earth, if the true test of a system's suc- 
cess be the gradual progress and amelioration of the human 
beings who are under its influence ? First, I believe, from its 
allowing polygamy. I do not judge Mohammed for having 
allowed it. He found it one of the ancestral and immemorial 
customs of his nation. He found it throughout the Hebrew 
Scriptures. He found it in the case of Abraham, his ideal man ; 
and, as he believed, the divinely inspired ancestor of his race. 
It seemed to him that what was right for Abraham, could not be 
wrong for an Arab. God shall judge him, not I. Moreover, 
the Christians of the East, divided into either monks or profli- 
gates, and with far lower and more brutal notions of the 
married state than were to be found in Arab poetry and legend, 
were the very last men on earth to make him feel the eternal 
and divine beauty of that pure wedded love which Christianity 
has not only proclaimed, but commanded, and thereby emanci- 
pated woman from her old slavery to the stronger sex. And I 
believe, from his chivalrous faithfulness to his good wife Kadijah, 
as long as she lived, that Mohammed was a man who could have 



390 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

accepted that great truth in all its fulness, had he but been 
taught it. He certainly felt the evil of polygamy so strongly as 
to restrict it in every possible way, except the only right way — 
namely, the proclamation of the true ideal of marriage. But 
his ignorance, mistake, sin, if you will — was a deflection from 
the right law, from the true constitution of man, and therefore it 
avenged itself. That chivalrous respect for woman, which was 
so strong in the early Mohammedans, died out. The women 
themselves — who, in the first few years of Islamism, rose as the 
men rose, and became their helpmates, counsellors, and fellow- 
warriors — degenerated rapidly into mere playthings. I need not 
enter into the painful subject of woman's present position in the 
East, and the social consequences thereof. But I firmly believe, 
not merely as a theory, but as a fact which may be proved by 
abundant evidence, that to polygamy alone is owing nine tenths of 
the present decay and old age of every Mussulman nation ; and 
that till it be utterly abolished, all Western civilization and capi- 
tal, and all the civil and religious liberty on earth, will not avail 
one jot toward their revival. You must regenerate the family 
before you can regenerate the nation, and the relation of husband 
and wife before the family ; because, as long as the root is cor- 
rupt, the fruit will be corrupt also. 

But there is another cause of the failure of Islamism, more 
intimately connected with those metaphysical questions which we 
have been hitherto principally considering. 

Among the first Mussulmen, as I have said, there was generally 
the most intense belief in each man that he was personally under 
a divine guide and teacher. But their creed contained nothing 
which could keep up that belief in the minds of succeeding gene- 
rations. They had destroyed the good with the evil, and they 
paid the penalty of their undistinguishing wrath. In sweeping 
away the idolatries and fetish worships of the Syrian Catholics, 
the Mussulmans had swept away also that doctrine which alone 
can deliver men from idolatry and fetish worships — if not out- 
ward and material ones, yet the still more subtle, and therefore 
more dangerous idolatries of the intellect. For they had swept 
away the belief in the Logos; in a divine teacher of every 
human soul, who was, in some mysterious way, the pattern and 
antitype of human virtue and wisdom. And more, they had 
swept away that belief in the incarnation of the Logos, which 
alone can make man feel that his divine teacher is one who can 
enter into the human duties, sorrows, doubts, of each human 
spirit. And, therefore, when Mohammed and his personal friends 
were dead, the belief in a present divine teacher, on the whole, 
died with them ; and the Mussulmans began to put the Koran in 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 391 

the place of Him of whom the Koran spoke. They began to 
worship the book — which after all is not a book, but only an 
irregular collection of Mohammed's meditations, and notes for 
sermons — with the most slavish and ridiculous idolatry. They fell 
into a cabbalism, and a superstitious reverence for the mere let- 
ters and words of the Koran, to which the cabbalism of the old 
Rabbis was moderate and rational. They surrounded it, and the 
history of Mohammed, with all ridiculous myths, and prodigies, 
and lying wonders, whereof the book itself contained not a word ; 
and which Mohammed, during his existence, had denied and 
repudiated, saying that he worked no miracles, and that none 
were needed ; because only reason was required to show a man 
the hand of a good God in all human affairs. Nevertheless, 
these later Mussulmans found the miracles necessary to confirm 
their faith : and why ? Because they had lost the sense of a 
present God, a God of order ; and therefore hankered, as men 
in such a mood always will, after prodigious and unnatural proofs 
of his having been once present with their founder Mohammed. 

And in the meanwhile that absolute and omnipotent Being 
whom Mohammed, arising out of his great darkness, had so nobly 
preached to the Koreish, receded in the minds of their descend- 
ants to an unapproachable and abysmal distance. For they had 
lost the sense of his present guidance, his personal care. They 
had lost all which could connect him with the working of their 
own souls, with their human duties and struggles, with the belief 
that his mercy and love were counterparts of human mercy and 
human love ; in plain English, that he was loving and merciful 
at all. The change came very gradually, thank God ; you may 
read of noble sayings and deeds here and there, for many cen- 
turies after Mohammed ; but it came ; and then their belief in 
God's omnipotence and absoluteness dwindled into the most dark, 
and slavish, and benumbing fatalism. His unchangeableness 
became in their minds not an unchangeable purpose to teach, 
forgive and deliver men — as it seemed to Mohammed to have 
been — but a mere brute necessity, an unchangeable purpose to 
have his own way, whatsoever that way might be. That dark 
fatalism, also, has helped toward the decay of the Mohammedan 
nations. It has made them careless of self-improvement, faith- 
less in the possibility of progress ; and has kept, and will keep, 
the Mohammedan nations, in all intellectual matters, whole ages 
behind the Christian nations of the West. 

How far the story of Omar's commanding the baths of Alex- 
andria to be heated with the books from the great library is true, 
we shall never know. Some have doubted the story altogether : 
but so many fresh corroborations of it are said to have been 



392 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

lately discovered, in Arabic writers, that I can hardly doubt that 
it had some foundation in fact. One cannot but believe that John 
Philoponus, the last of the Alexandrian grammarians, when he 
asked his patron Amrou the gift of the library, took care to save 
some, at least, of its treasures ; and howsoever strongly Omar 
may have felt or said that all books which agreed with the Koran 
were useless, and all which disagreed with it only fit to be des- 
troyed, the general feeling of the Mohammedan leaders was very 
different. As they settled in the various countries which they 
conquered, education seems to have been considered by them an 
important object. We even find some of them, in the same gen- 
eration as Mohammed, obeying strictly the Prophet's command 
to send all captive children to school — a fact which speaks as 
well for the Mussulmen's good sense, as it speaks ill for the state 
of education among the degraded descendants of the Greek con- 
querors of the East. Gradually philosophic schools arose, first 
at Bagdad, and then at Cordova ; and the Arabs carried on the 
task of commenting on Aristotle's Logic, and Ptolemy's Megiste, 
Syntaxis — which last acquired from them the name of Almagest, 
by which it was so long known during the Middle Ages. 

But they did little but comment, though there was no Neopla- 
tonic or mystic element in their commentaries. It seems as if 
Alexandria was preordained, by its very central position, to be 
the city of commentators, not of originators. It is worthy of 
remark, that Philoponus, who may be considered as the man who 
first introduced the simple warriors of the Koreish to the treas- 
ures of Greek thought, seems to have been the first rebel against 
the Neoplatonist eclecticism. He maintained, and truly, that 
Porphyry, Proclus, and the rest, had entirely misunderstood 
Aristotle, when they attempted to reconcile him with Plato, or 
incorporate his philosophy into Platonism. Aristotle was hence- 
forth the text-book of Arab savans. It was natural enough. 
The Mussulman mind was trained in habits of absolute obedience 
to the authority of fixed dogmas. All those attempts to follow 
out metaphysic to its highest object, theology, would be useless if 
not w r rong in the eyes of a Mussulman, who had already his 
simple and sharply defined creed on all matters relating to the 
unseen world. With him metaphysic was a study altogether 
divorced from man's higher life and aspirations. So also were 
physics. What need had he of cosmogonies? what need to 
trace the relations between man and the universe, or the uni- 
verse and its Maker ? He had his definite material Elysium 
and Tartarus, as the only ultimate relation between man and the 
universe ; his dogma of an absolute fiat, creating arbitrary and 
once for all, as the only relation between the universe and its 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 393 

Maker : and further it was not lawful to speculate. The idea 
which I believe unites both physic and metaphysic with man's 
highest aspirations and widest speculations, — the Alexandria idea 
of the Logos, of the Deity working in time and space by succes- 
sive thoughts, — he had not heard of; for it was dead, as I have 
said, in Alexandria itself; and if he had heard of it, he would 
have spurned it as detracting from the absoluteness of that abys- 
mal one Being, of whom he so nobly yet so partially bore witness. 
So it was to be ; doubtless, it was right that it should be so. 
Man's eye is too narrow to see a whole truth, his brain too weak 
to carry a whole truth. Better for him, and better for the world, 
is perhaps the method on which man has been educated in every 
age, by which to each school, or party, or nation, is given some 
one great truth, which they are to work out to its highest devel- 
opment, to exemplify in actual life, leaving some happier age — 
perhaps, alas ! only, some future state — to reconcile that too 
favoured dogma with other truths which lie beside it, and with- 
out which it is always incomplete, and sometimes altogether 
barren. 

But such schools of science, founded on such a ground as this, 
on the mere instinct of curiosity, had little chance of originality 
or vitality. All the great schools of the world, the elder Greek 
philosophy, the Alexandrian, the present Baconian school of 
physics, have had a deeper motive for their search, a far higher 
object which they hope to discover. But indeed, the Mussul- 
mans did not so much wish to discover truth, as to cultivate their 
own intellects. For that purpose a sharp and subtle systematist, 
like Aristotle, was the very man whom they required ; and from 
the destruction of Alexandria may date the rise of the Aristote- 
lian philosophy. Translations of his works were made into 
Arabic, first, it is said, from Persian and Syriac translations ; the 
former of which had been made during the sixth and seventh 
centuries, by the wreck of the Neoplatonist party, during their 
visit to the philosophic Chozroos. A century after, they filled 
Alexandria. After them Almansoor, Hairoun Alraschid, and 
their successors, who patronized the Nestorian Christians, ob- 
tained from them translations of the philosophic, medical, and 
astronomical Greek works ; while the last of the Omniades, 
Abdalrahman, had introduced the same literary taste into Spain, 
where, in the thirteenth century, Averroes and Maimonides 
rivalled the fame of Avicenna, who had flourished at Bagdad a 
century before. 

But, as I have said already, these Arabs seem to have invented 
nothing ; they only commented. And yet not only commented ; 
for they preserved for us those works of whose real value they 
17* 



394 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES, 

were so little aware. Averroes, in quality of commentator on 
Aristotle, became his rival in the urines of the mediaeval school- 
men ; Avicenna, in quality of commentator on Hippocrates and 
Galen, was for centuries the text-book of all European physi- 
cians ; while Albatani and Aboul Wefa, as astronomers, com- 
mented on Ptolemy, not however without making a few important 
additions to his knowledge ; for Aboul Wefa discovered a third 
inequality of the moon's motion, in addition to the two mentioned 
by Ptolemy, which he did, according to Professor Whewell, in a 
truly philosophic manner — an apparently solitary instance, and 
one which, in its own day, had no effect ; for the fact was for- 
gotten, and rediscovered centuries after by Tycho Brahe. To 
Albatani, however, we owe two really valuable heirlooms. The 
one is the use of the sine, or half-chord of the double arc, instead 
of the chord of the arc itself, which had been employed by the 
Greek astronomers ; the other, of even more practical benefit, 
was the introduction of the present decimal arithmetic, instead of 
the troublesome sexagesimal arithmetic of the Greeks. These 
ten digits, however, seem, says Professor Whewell, by the con- 
fession of the Arabians themselves, to be of Indian origin, and 
thus form no exception to the sterility of the Arabian genius in 
scientific inventions. Nevertheless we are bound, in all fairness, 
to set against his condemnation of the Arabs Professor De Mor- 
gan's opinion of the Moslem, in his article on Euclid : " Some 
writers speak slightingly of this progress, the results of which 
they are too apt to compare with those of our own time. They 
ought rather to place the Saracens by the side of their own 
Gothic ancestors ; and, making some allowance for the more ad- 
vantageous circumstances under which the first started, they 
should view the second systematically dispersing the remains of 
Greek civilization, while the first were concentrating the geom- 
etry of Alexandria, the arithmetic and algebra of India, and the 
astronomy of both, to form a nucleus for the present state of 
science." 

•To this article of Professor Morgan's on Euclid,* and to Pro- 
fessor Whewell's excellent History of the Inductive Sciences 
from which I, being neither Arabic scholar nor astronomer, have 
drawn most of my facts about physical science, I must refer 
those who wish to know more of the early rise of physics, and 
of their preservation by the Arabs, till a great and unexpected 
event brought them back again to the quarter of the globe where 
they had their birth, and where alone they could be. regenerated 
into a new and practical life. 

That great event was the Crusades. We have heard little of 
* Smith's Classical Dictionary. 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 395 

Alexandria lately. Its intellectual glory had departed westward 
and eastward, to Cordova and to Bagdad ; its commercial great- 
ness had left it for Cairo and Damietta. But Egypt was still the 
centre of communication between the two great stations of the 
Moslem power, and indeed, as Mr. Lane has shown in his most 
valuable translation of the Arabian Nights, possessed a peculiar 
life and character of its own. 

It was the rash object of the Crusaders to extinguish that life. 
Palestine was first their point of attack : but the later Crusaders 
seem to have found, like the rest of the world, that the destinies 
of Palestine could not be separated from those of Egypt ; and to 
Damietta, accordingly, was directed that last disastrous attempt 
of St. Louis, which all may read so graphically described in the 
pages of Joinville. 

The Crusaders failed utterly of the object at which they aimed. 
They succeeded in an object of which they never dreamed ; for 
in those Crusades the Moslem and the Christian had met face to 
face, and found that both were men, that they had a common 
humanity, a common eternal standard of nobleness and virtue. 
So the Christian knights went home humbler and wiser men, 
when they found in the Saracen emirs the same generosity, truth, 
mercy, chivalrous self-sacrifice, which they had fancied their own 
peculiar possession, and added to that, a civilization and a learn- 
ing which they could only admire and imitate. And thus, from 
the era of the Crusades, a kindlier feeling sprung up between 
the Crescent and the Cross, till it was again broken by the fear- 
ful invasions of the Turks throughout eastern Europe. The 
learning of the Moslem, as well as their commerce, began to 
pour rapidly into Christendom, both from Spain, Egypt, and 
Syria ; and thus the Crusaders were, indeed, rewarded accord- 
ing to their deeds. They had fancied that they were bound to 
vindicate the possession of the earth for him to whom they be- 
lieved the earth belonged. He showed them — or rather He has 
shown us, their children — that He can vindicate his own do- 
minion better far than man can do it for Him ; and their cruel 
and unjust aim was utterly foiled. That was not the way to 
make men know or obey Him. They took the sword, and per- 
ished by the sword. But the truly noble element in them, — the 
element which our hearts and reasons recognize and love, in spite 
of all the loud words about the folly and fanaticism of the Cru- 
sades, whensoever we read the Talisman or Ivanhoe, — the ele- 
ment of loyal faith and self-sacrifice — did not go unrequited. 
They learnt wider, juster views of man and virtue, which I can- 
not help believing must have had great effect in weakening in 
their minds their old, exclusive, and bigoted notions, and in 



396 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

paving the way for the great outburst of free thought, and the 
great assertion of the dignity of humanity, which the fifteenth 
century beheld. They opened a path for that influx of scientific 
knowledge which has produced, in after centuries, the most enor- 
mous effects on the welfare of Europe, and made life possible 
for millions who would otherwise have been pent within the 
narrow bounds of Europe, to devour each other in the struggle 
for room and bread. 

But those Arabic translations of Greek authors were a fatal 
gift for Egypt, and scarcely less fatal gift for Bagdad. In that 
Almagest of Ptolemy, in that Organon of Aristotle, which the 
Crusaders are said to have brought home, lay, rude and em- 
bryotic, the germs of that physical science, that geographical 
knowledge, which has opened to the European the commerce 
and the colonization of the globe. Within three hundred years 
after his works reached Europe, Ptolemy had taught the Por- 
tuguese to sail round Africa ; and from that day the stream of 
eastern wealth flowed no longer through the Red Sea, or the 
Persian Gulf, on its way to the new countries of the West ; and 
not only Alexandria, but Damietta and Bagdad, dwindled down 
to their present insignificance. And yet the whirligig of time 
brings about its revenges. The stream of commerce is now 
rapidly turning back to its old channel ; and British science bids 
fair to make Alexandria once more the inn of all the nations. 

It is with a feeling of awe that one looks upon the huge possi- 
bilities of her future. Her own physical capacities, as the great 
mind of Napoleon saw, are what they have always been, inex- 
haustible ; and science has learnt to set at nought the only defect 
of situation which has ever injured her prosperity, namely, the 
short land passage from the Nile to the Red Sea. The fate of 
Palestine is now more than ever bound up with her fate ; and a 
British or French colony might, holding the two countries, 
develop itself into a nation as vast as sprang from Alexander's 
handful of Macedonians, and become the meeting point for the 
nations of the West, and those great Anglo-Saxon peoples who 
seem destined to spring up in the Australian ocean. Wide as 
the dream may appear, steam has made it a far narrower one 
than the old actual fact, that for centuries the Phoenician and 
the Arabian interchanged at Alexandria the produce of Britain 
for that of Ceylon and Hindostan. And as for intellectual devel- 
opment, though Alexandria, wants, as she has always wanted, 
that insular and exclusive position which seems almost necessary 
to develop original thought and original national life, yet she may 
still act as the point of fusion for distinct schools and polities, and 
the young and buoyant vigour of the new-born nations may at 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 397 

once teach, and learn from, the prudence, the experience, the 
traditional wisdom of the ancient Europeans. 

This vision, however possible, may be a far-off one : but the 
first step towards it, at least, is being laid before our eyes, — and 
that is, a fresh reconciliation between the Crescent and the 
Cross. Apart from all political considerations, which would be 
out of place here, I hail, as a student of philosophy, the school 
which is now, both in Alexandria and in Constantinople, teach- 
ing to Moslem and to Christians the same lesson which the Cru- 
saders learnt in Egypt five hundred years ago. A few years' 
more perseverance in the valiant and righteous course which 
Britain has now chosen, will reward itself by opening a vast field 
for capital and enterprise, for the introduction of civil and relig- 
ious liberty among the down-trodden peasantry of Egypt ; as the 
Giaour becomes an object of respect, and trust, and gratitude to 
the Moslem ; and as the feeling that Moslem and Giaour own a 
common humanity, a common eternal standard of justice and 
mercy, a common sacred obligation to perform our promises, and 
to succour the oppressed, shall have taken place of the old brute 
wonder at our careless audacity, and awkward assertion of power, 
which now expresses itself in the somewhat left-handed Alexan- 
drian compliment, — " There is one Satan, and there are many 
Satans : but there is no Satan like a Frank in a round hat." 

It would be both uncourteous and unfair of me to close these 
my hasty Lectures, without expressing my hearty thanks for the 
great courtesy and kindness which I have received in this my 
first visit to your most noble and beautiful city, and often, I am 
proud to say, from those who differ from me deeply on many im- 
portant points ; and also for the attention with which I have been 
listened to while trying, clumsily enough, to explain dry and 
repulsive subjects, and to express opinions which may be new, 
and perhaps startling, to many of my hearers. If my imperfect 
hints shall have stirred up but one hearer to investigate this 
obscure and yet most important subject, and to examine for him- 
self the original documents, I shall feel that my words in this 
place have not been spoken in vain ; for even if such a seeker 
should arrive at conclusions different from my own (and I pre- 
tend to no infallibility,) he will at least have learnt new facts, the 
parents of new thought, perhaps of new action ; he will have 
come face to face with new human beings, in whom he will have 
been compelled to take a human interest ; and will surely rise 
from his researches, let them lead him where they will, at least 
somewhat of a wider-minded and a wider-hearted man. 



S98 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES, 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 

BY A MINUTE PHILOSOPHER. 

[Fraser's Magazine.'} 

So, my friend : you ask me to tell you how I contrive to sup- 
port this monotonous country life ; how, fond as I am of excite- 
ment, adventure, society, scenery, art, literature, I go cheerfully 
through the daily routine of a commonplace country profession, 
never requiring a six-weeks' holiday ; not caring to see the Con- 
tinent, hardly even to spend a day in London ; having never yet 
actually got to Paris. 

You wonder why I do not grow dull as those round me, whose 
talk is of bullocks — as indeed mine is often enough ; why I am 
not by this time " all over blue mould ; " why I have not been 
tempted to bury myself in my study, and live a life of dreams 
among old books. 

I will tell you. I am a minute philosopher. I am possibly, 
after all, a man of small mind, content with small pleasures. So 
much the better for me. Meanwhile, I can understand your sur- 
prise, though you cannot understand my content. You have 
played a greater game than mine ; have lived a life, perhaps, 
more fit for an Englishman ; certainly more in accordance with 
the taste of our common fathers, the Vikings, and their patron 
Odin " the goer," father of all them that go ahead. You have 
gone ahead, and over many lands ; and I reverence you for it, 
though I envy you not. You have commanded a regiment — in- 
deed an army, and " drank delight of battle with your peers ; 
you have ruled provinces, and done justice and judgment, like a 
noble Englishman as you are, old friend, among thousands who 
never knew before what justice and judgment were. You have 
tasted (and you have deserved to taste) the joy of old David's 
psalms when he has hunted down the last of the robber lords of 
Palestine. You have seen " a people whom you have not known, 
serve you. As soon as they heard of you, they obeyed you ; but 
the strange children dissembled with you : " yet before you, too, 
" the strange children failed, and trembled in their hill-forts." 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 399 

Noble work that was to do, and nobly you have done it ; and I 
do not wonder that to a man who has been set to such a task, and 
given power to carry it through, all smaller work must seem pal- 
try ; that such a man's very amusements, in that grand Indian 
land, and that free adventurous Indian life, exciting the imagina- 
tion, calling out all the self-help and daring of a man, should 
have been on a par with your work ; that when you go a-sport- 
ing, you ask for no meaner preserve than the primaeval forest, no 
lower park wall than the snow-peaks of the Himalaya. 

Yes ; you have been a " burra Shikarree " as well as a burra 
Sahib. You have played the great game in your work, and 
killed the great game in your play. How many tons of mighty 
monsters have you done to death, since we two were school-boys 
together, five-and-twenty years ago ? How 'many starving vil- 
lages have you fed with the flesh of elephant or buffalo ? How 
many have you delivered from man-eating tigers, or wary old alli- 
gators, their craws full of poor girls' bangles ? Have you not 
been charged by rhinoceroses, all but ript up by boars ? Have 
you not seen face to face Ovis Ammon himself, the giant moun- 
tain sheep — primaeval ancestor, perhaps, of all the flocks on earth ? 
Your memories must be like those of Theseus and Hercules, full 
of slain monsters. Your brains must be one fossiliferous deposit, 
in which buffalo arid samber, hog and tiger, rhinoceros and ele- 
phant, lie heaped together, as the old ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs 
are heaped in the lias rocks at Lyme. And therefore I like to 
think of you. I try, to picture your feelings to myself. I spell 
over with my boy Mayne Reid's delightful books, or the Old 
Forest Ranger, or Williams's old Tiger Booh, with Howitt's 
plates, and try to realize the glory of a burra Shikarree ; and 
as I read and imagine, feel with Sir Hugh Evans, " a great dis- 
position to cry." 

For there were times, full many a year ago, wdien my brains 
were full of bison and grizzly bear, mustang and big-horn, Black- 
foot and Pawnee, and hopes of wild adventure in the Far West, 
which I shall never see ; for ere I was three-and-twenty I discov- 
ered, plainly enough, that my lot was to stay at home and earn 
my bread in a very quiet way ; that England was to be hence- 
forth my prison or my palace, as I should choose to make it ; 
and I have made it, by Heaven's help, the latter. 

I will confess to you, though, that in those first heats of youth, 
this little England — or rather, this little patch of moor in which 
I have struck roots as firm as the wild fir-trees do — looked at 
moments rather like a prison than a palace ; that my foolish 
young heart would sigh, " Oh ! that I had wings " — not as a dove, 
to fly home to its nest and croodle there — but as an eagle, to 



400 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

swoop away over land and sea, in a rampant and self-glorifying 
fashion, on which I now look back as altogether unwholesome 
and undesirable. But the thirst for adventure and excitement 
was strong in me, as perhaps it ought to be in all at twenty-five. 
Others went out to see the glorious new worlds of the West, the 
glorious old worlds of the East — why should not I ? Others ram- 
bled over Alps and Apennines, Italian picture-galleries and pal- 
aces, filling their minds with fair memories — why should not I? 
Others discovered new wonders in botany and zoology— why 
should not I ? Others too, like you, fulfilled to the utmost that 
strange lust after the burra shikar, which even now makes my 
pulse throb as often as I see the stags' heads in our friend 

A 's hall : why should not I ? It is not learnt in a day, the 

golden lesson of the Old Collect, to " love the thing which is 
commanded, and desire that which is promised." Not in a day : 
but in fifteen years one can spell out a little of its worth ; and 
when one finds one's self on the wrong side of eight-and-thirty, 
and the first gray hairs begin to show on the temples, and one 
can no longer jump as high as one's third button — scarcely, alas ! 
to any button at all ; and what with innumerable sprains, bruises, 
soakings, and chillings, one's lower limbs feel in a cold thaw 
much like an old post-horse's, why, one makes a virtue of neces- 
sity ; and if one still lusts after sights, takes the nearest, and 
looks for wonders, not in the Himalayas or Lake Ngami, but in 
the turf on the lawn and the brook in the park ; and with good 
Alphonse Karr enjoys the macro-microcosm in one Tour autour 
de mon jar4in. 

For there it is, friend, the whole infinite miracle of nature in 
every tuft of grass, if we have only eyes to see it, and can dis- 
abuse our minds of that tyrannous phantom of size. Only rec- 
ollect that great and small are but relative terms ; that in truth 
nothing is great or small, save in proportion to the quantity of 
creative thought which has been exercised in making it ; that the 
fly who basks upon one of the trilithons of Stonehenge, is in 
truth infinitely greater than all Stonehenge together, though he 
may measure the tenth of an inch, and the stone on which he 
sits five and twenty feet. You differ from me ? Be it so. Even 
if you prove me wrong I will believe myself in the right : I can- 
not afford to do otherwise. If you rob me of my faith in " minute 
philosophy," you rob me of a continual source of content, sur- 
prise, delight. 

So go your way and I mine, each working with all his might, 
and playing with all his might, in his own place and way. Re- 
member only that though I never can come round to your sphere, 
you must some day come round to me in the day when wounds, 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 401 

or weariness, or merely, as I hope, a healthy old age, will shut 
you out for once and for all from burra shikar, whether human 
or quadruped — For you surely will not take to politics in your 
old age ? I shall not surely live to see you (as I saw many a 
fine fellow — woe's me ! — last year) sohciting the votes, not of the 
j)eople, but of the snobocracy, on the ground of your having 
neither policy, nor principles, nor even opinions, upon any matter 
in heaven or earth ? — Then in that day will you be forced, my 
friend, to do what I have done this many a year ; to refrain your 
soul and keep it low. You will see more and more the depth of 
human ignorance, the vanity of human endeavors. You will feel 
more and more that the world is going God's way, and not yours, 
or mine, or any man's ; and that if you have been allowed to do 
good work on earth, that work is probably as different from what 
you fancy it as the tree is from the seed whence it springs. You 
will grow content, therefore, not to see the real fruit of your 
labours ; because if you saw it you would probably be frightened 
at it, and what is very good in the eyes of God would not be 
very good in yours ; and content, also, to receive your discharge, 
and work and fight no more, sure that God is working and fight- 
ing whether you are in hospital or in the field. And with this 
growing sense of the pettiness of human struggles will grow on 
you a resj3ect for simple labours, a thankfulness for simple pleas- 
ures, a sympathy with simple people, and possibly, my trusty 
friend, with me and my little tours about that moorland which I 
call my winter-garden, and which is to me as full of glory and 
of instruction as the Himalaya or the Punjab are to you, and in 
which I contrive to find as much health and amusement as I have 
time for — and who ought to have more ? 

I call the said garden mine, not because I own it in any legal 
sense, (for only in a few acres have I a life interest,) but in that 
higher sense in which ten thousand people can own the same 
thing, and yet no man's right interfere with another's. To whom 
does the Apollo Belvedere belong, but to all who have eyes to 
see its beauty ? So does my winter-garden ; and therefore to 
me among the rest. 

And therefore (which is a gain to a poor man) my pleasure in 
it is a very cheap one. So are all those of a minute philosopher, 
except his microscope. But my winter-garden, which is far 
larger, at all events, than that famous one at Chatsworth, costs 
me not one penny in keeping up. Poor, did I call myself? Is 
it not true wealth to have all I want without paying for it ? Is it 
not true wealth, royal wealth, to have some twenty gentlemen 
and noblemen, nay, even royal personages, planting and improv- 
ing for me ? Is it not more than royal wealth to have sun and 



402 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

frost, gulf-stream and southwesters, laws of geology, philology, 
physiology, and other ologies— in a word, the whole universe and 
the powers thereof, day and night, paving, planting, roofing, light- 
ing, colouring my winter-garden for me, without my even having 
the trouble to rub a magic ring and tell the genie to go to work ? 

Yes. I am very rich, as every man may be who will. In the 
doings of our little country neighbourhood I find tragedy and 
comedy, too fantastic, sometimes too sad, to be written down. In 
the words of those whose talk is of bullocks, I find the materials 
of all possible metaphysic, and long weekly that I had time to 
work them out. In fifteen miles of moorland I find the ma- 
terials of all possible physical science, and long, too, that I had 
time to work out one smallest segment of that great sphere. How 
can I be richer, if I have lying at my feet all day a thousand 
times more wealth than I can use ? 

Some people — most people — in these run-about railway days, 
would complain of such a life, in such a "narrow sphere," so 
they call it, as monotonous. Very likely it is so. But is it to be 
complained of on that account ? Is monotony in itself an evil ? 
Which is better, to know many places ill, or to know one place 
well ? Certainly — if a scientific habit of mind be a gain — it is 
only by exhausting as far as possible the significance of an indi- 
vidual phenomenon (is not that sentence a truly scientific one in 
its magniloquence ?) — that you can discover any glimpse of the 
significance of the universal. Even men of boundless knowledge, 
like Humboldt, must have had once their specialty, their pet 
subject, or they would have, strictly speaking, no knowledge at 
all. The volcanoes of Mexico, patiently and laboriously investi- 
gated in his youth, were to Humboldt, possibly, the key of the 
whole Cosmos. I learn more, studying over and over again the 
same Bagshot sand and gravel heaps, than I should by roaming 
all Europe in search of new geologic wonders. Fifteen years 
have I been puzzling at the same questions, and have only 
guessed at a few of the answers. What sawed out the edges 
of the moors into long narrow banks of gravel ? What cut them 
off all flat atop ? What makes Erica ciliaris grow in one soil, 
and the bracken in another ? How did three species of Club- 
moss — one of them quite an Alpine one — get down here, all the 
way from Wales perhaps, upon this isolated patch of gravel ? 
Why did that one patch of Carex arenaria settle in the only 
square yard for miles and miles which bore sufficient resemblance 
to its native sand-hill by the sea-shore, to make it comfortable ? 
Why did Myosurus minimus, which I had hunted for in vain for 
fourteen years, appear by dozens in the fifteenth, upon a new- 
made bank, which had been for at least for two hundred years a 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 403 

farmyard gateway ? Why does it generally rain here from the 
southwest, not when the barometer falls, but when it begins to 
rise again? Why — why is every thing, which lies under my 
feet all day long ? I don't know ; and you can't tell me. And 
till I have found out, I cannot complain of monotony, with still 
undiscovered puzzles waiting to be explained, and so to create 
novelty at every turn. 

Besides, monotony is pleasant in itself; morally pleasant, and 
morally useful. Marriage is monotonous ; but there is much, I 
trust, to be said in favour of holy wedlock. Living in the same 
house is monotonous : but three removes, say the wise, are as 
bad as a fire. Locomotion is regarded as an evil by our Litany. 
The Litany, as usual, is right. " Those who travel by land or 
sea " are to be objects of our pity and our prayers ; and I do pity 
them. I delight in that same monotony. It saves curiosity, 
anxiety, excitement, disappointment, and a host of bad passions. 
It gives a man the blessed invigorating feeling that he is at 
home ; that he has roots, deep and wide, struck down into all he 
sees ; and that only the Being who will do nothing cruel or use- 
less can tear them up. It is pleasant to look down on the same 
parish day after day, and say, I know all that lies beneath, and 
all beneath know me. If I want a friend, I know where to find 
him ; if I want work done, I know who will do it. It is pleasant 
and good to see the same trees year after year ; the same birds 
coming back in the spring to the same shrubs ; the same banks 
covered with the same flowers, and broken (if they be stiff* ones) 
by the same gaps. Pleasant and good it is to ride the same 
horse, to sit in the same chair, to wear the same old coat. That 
man who offered twenty pounds reward for a lost carpet bag full 
of old boots was a sage, and I wish I knew him. Why should 
one change one's place; any more than one's wife or one's chil- 
dren ? Is a hermit-crab, slipping his tail out of one strange shell 
into another, in the hopes of its fitting him a little better, either 
a dignified, safe, or graceful animal ? No ; George Riddler was 
a true philosopher. 

" Let vules go sarching vur and nigh, 
We bides at Whum, my dog and I; " 

and become there, not only wiser, but more charitable ; for the 
oftener one sees, the better one knows ; and the better one knows, 
the more one loves. 

It is an easy philosophy ; especially in the case of the horse, 
where a man cannot afford more than one, as I cannot. To own 
a stud of horses, after all, is not to own horses at all, but riding- 
machines. Your rich man who rides Crimoea in the morning, 



404 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Sir Guy in the afternoon, and Sultan to-morrow, and something 
else the next day, may be a very gallant rider : but it is a ques- 
tion whether he enjoys the pleasure which one horse gives to the 
poor man who rides him day after day ; one horse who is not a 
slave, but a friend ; who has learnt all his tricks of voice, hand, 
heel, and knows what his master wants, even without being told; 
who will bear with his master's infirmities, and feels secure that 
his master will bear with his in turn. 

Possibly, after all, the grapes are sour ; and were one rich, one 
would do even as the rich are wont ; but still, I am a minute 
philosopher. And therefore, this afternoon, after I have done the 
same work, visited the same people, and said the same words to 
them, w r hich I have done for years past, and shall, I trust, for 
many a year to come, I shall go wandering out into the same 
winter-garden on the same old mare ; and think the same thoughts, 
and see the same fir-trees, and meet perhaps the same good fel- 
lows hunting of their fox, as I have done with full content this 
many a year ; and rejoice, as I said before, in my own boundless 
wealth, who have the whole universe to look at, without being 
charged one penny for the show. 

As I have said, the grapes may be sour, and I enjoy the want 
of luxuries only because I cannot get them; but if my self- 
deception be useful to me, leave it alone. 

No one. is less inclined to depreciate that magnificent winter- 
garden at the Crystal Palace : yet let me, if I choose, prefer my 
own ; I argue that, in the first place, it is far larger. You may 
drive, I hear, through that grand one at Chatsworth for a quarter 
of a mile. You may ride through mine for fifteen miles on end. 
I prefer, too, to any glass roof which Sir Joseph Paxton ever 
planned, that dome above my head some three miles high, of 
soft dappled gray and yellow cloud, through the vast lattice-work 
whereof the blue sky peeps, and sheds down tender gleams on 
yellow bogs and softly rounded heather knolls, and pale chalk- 
ranges gleaming far away. But above all, I glory in my ever- 
greens. What winter-garden can compare for them with mine? 
True, I have but four kinds — the Scotch fir, the holly, furze, and 
the heath ; and by way of relief to them, only brows of brown 
fern, sheets of yellow bog-grass, and here and there a leafless 
birch, whose purple tresses are even more lovely to my eye than 
those fragrant green ones which she puts on in spring. Well : 
in painting as in music, what effects are more grand than those 
produced by the scientific combination, in endlessly new variety, of 
a few simple elements ? Enough for me is the one purple birch, 
the bright hollies round its stem sparkling with scarlet beads ; the 
furze-patch, rich with its lace-work of interwoven light and shade, 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 405 

tipped here and there with a golden bud ; the deep soft heather 
carpet, which invites you to lie down and dream for hours ; and 
behind all, the wall of red fir-stems, and the dark fir-roof with its 
jagged edges a mile long, against the soft gray sky. 

An ugly straight-edged, monotonous fir plantation ? Well, I 
like it, outside and inside. I need no saw-edge of mountain peaks 
to stir up my imagination with the sense of the sublime, while I 
can watch the saw-edge of those fir peaks against the red sunset. 
They are my Alps ; little ones, it may be : but after all, as I 
asked before, what is size ? A phantom of our brain ; an optical 
delusion. Grandeur, if you will consider wisely, consists in form, 
and not in size : and to the eye of the philosopher, the curve 
drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as magnificent, just as 
symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in 
the span of some cathedral roof. Have you eyes to see ? Then 
lie down on the grass, and look near enough to see something 
more of what is to be seen ; and you will find tropic jungles in 
every square foot of turf; mountain cliffs and debacles at the 
mouth of every rabbit burrow ; dark strids, tremendous cataracts, 
" deep glooms and sudden glories," in every foot-broad rill which 
wanders through the turf. All is there for you to see, if you will 
but rid yourself of " that idol of space ; " and Nature, as every 
one will tell you who has seen dissected an insect under the 
microscope, as grand and graceful in her smallest as in her hugest 
forms. 

The March breeze is chilly : but I can be always warm if I 
like in my winter-garden. I turn my horse's head to the red 
wall of fir stems, and leap over the furze-grown bank into my 
cathedral ; (wherein, if there be no saints, there are likewise no 
priestcraft and no idols ;) — but endless vistas of smooth red, 
green-veined shafts holding up the warm dark roof, lessening 
away into endless gloom — paved with rich brown fir-needle — a 
carpet at which Nature has been at work for forty years. Red 
shafts, green roof, and here and there a pane of blue sky — 
neither Owen Jones nor Willement can improve upon that eccle- 
siastical ornamentation, — while for incense I have the fresh 
healthy turpentine fragrance, far sweeter to my nostrils than the 
stifling narcotic odour which fills a Roman-catholic cathedral. 
There is not a breath of air within : but the breeze sighs over 
the roof above in a soft whisper. I shut my eyes, and listen. 
Surely that is the murmur of the summer sea upon the summer 
sands in Devon far away. I hear the innumerable wavelets 
spend themselves gently upon the shore, and die away to rise 
again. And with the innumerable wave-sighs come innumerable 
memories, and faces which I shall never see again upon this 
earth. I will not tell even you of that, old friend. 



406 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

It has two notes, two keys rather, that Eolian-harp of fir- 
needles above my head ; according as the wind is east or west, 
the needles dry or wet. This easterly key of to-day is shriller, 
more cheerful, warmer in sound, though the day itself be colder ; 
but grander still, as well as softer, is the sad soughing key in 
which the southwest wind roars on, rain-laden, over the forest, 
and calls me forth — being a minute philosopher — to catch trout 
in the nearest chalk-stream. 

The breeze is gone awhile ; and I am in perfect silence, a 
silence which may be heard. Not a sound ; and not a moving 
object ; absolutely none. The absence of animal life is solemn, 
startling. That ring-dove, who was cooing half a mile away, 
has hushed his moan ; that flock of long-tailed titmice, which 
were twinging and pecking about the fir-cones a few minutes 
since, are gone ; and now there is not even a gnat to quiver in 
the slant sunrays. Did a spider run over those dead leaves, I 
almost fancy I could hear his footfall. The creaking of the sad- 
dle, the soft footfall of the mare upon the fir-needles, jar my 
ears. I seem alone in a dead world. A dead world ; and yet 
so full of life, if I had eyes to see ! Above my head every fir- 
needle is breathing, breathing, for ever, and currents unnumbered 
circulate in every bough, quickened by some undiscovered 
miracle ; around me every fir-stem is distilling strange juices, 
which no laboratory of man can make ; and where my dull eye 
sees only death, the eye of God sees boundless life and motion, 
health and use. 

Slowly I wander on beneath the warm roof of the winter- 
garden, and meditate upon that one word — Life ; and specially 
on all that Mr. Lewes has written so well thereon of late — for 
instance — 

" We may consider Life itself as an ever-increasing identification 
with Nature. The simple cell, from which the plant or animal arises, 
must draw light and heat from the sun, nutriment from the surround- 
ing world, or else it will remain quiescent, not alive, though latent with 
life ; as the grains in the Egyptian tombs, which after lying thousands 
of years in those sepulchres, are placed in the earth, and smile forth 
as golden wheat. What we call growth, is it not a perpetual absorp- 
tion of Nature, the identification of the individual with the universal ? 
And may we not, in speculative moods, consider Death as the grand 
impatience of the soul to free itself from the circle of individual 
activity — the yearning of the creature to be united with the Creator ? 

" As with Life, so with knowledge, which is intellectual Life. In 
the early days of man's history, Nature and her marvellous ongoings 
were regarded with but a casual and careless eye, or else with the 
merest wonder. It was late before profound and reverent study of 
her laws could wean man from impatient speculations ; and now, what 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 407 

is our intellectual activity based on, except on the more thorough 
mental absorption of Nature ? When that absorption is completed, 
the mystic drama will be sunny clear, and all Nature's processes be 
visible to man, as a Divine Effluence and Life." 

True : yet not all the truth. But who knows all the truth? 

Not I. " We see through a glass darkly," said St. Paul of 
old ; and what is more, dazzle and weary our eyes, like clumsy 
microscopists, by looking too long and earnestly through the 
imperfect and by no means achromatic lens. Enough. I will 
think of something else. I will think of nothing at all — 

Stay. There was a sound at last ; a light footfall. 

A hare races towards us through the ferns, her great bright 
eyes full of terror, her ears aloft to catch some sound behind. 
She sees us, turns shorthand vanishes into the gloom. The mare 
pricks up her ears too, listens, and looks : but not the way the 
hare has gone. There is something more coming ; I can trust 
the finer sense of the horse, to which (and no wonder) the 
Middle Age attributed the power of seeing ghosts and fairies 
impalpable to man's gross eyes. Beside, that hare was not 
travelling in search of food. She was not " loping " along, look- 
ing around her right and left, but galloping steadily. She has 
been frightened ; she has been put up ; but what has put her 
up ? And there, far away among the fir-stems, rings the shriek 
of a startled blackbird. What has put him up ? 

That, old mare, at sight whereof your wise eyes widen till 
they are ready to burst, and your ears are first shot forward 
tow r ard your nose, and then laid back with vicious intent. Stand 
still, old woman ! Do you think still, after fifteen winters, that 
you can catch a fox ? 

A fox, it is indeed ; a great dog-fox, as red as the fir-stems 
between which he glides. And yet his legs are black with fresh 
peat stains. He is a hunted fox : but he has not been up long. 

The mare stands like a statue : but I can feel her trembling 
between my knees. Positively he does not see us. He sits 
down in the middle of a ride, turns his great ears right and left, 
and then scratches one of them with his hind foot, seemingly to 
make it hear the better. Now he is up again and on. 

Beneath yon firs, some hundred yards aw r ay, standeth, or rather 
lieth, for it is on dead flat ground, the famous castle of Male- 
partus, which beheld the base murder of Lampe, the hare, and 
many a seely soul beside. I know it well ; a patch of sand 
heaps, mingled with great holes, amid the twining fir roots ; an- 
cient home of the last of the w T ild beasts. And thither, unto 
Malepartus safe and strong, trots Keinecke, where he hopes to 



408 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

be snug among the labyrinthine windings, and innumerable start- 
ing holes, as the old apologue has it, of his ballium, covert-way, 
and donjon keep. Full blown in self-satisfaction he trots, lifting 
his toes delicately, and carrying his brush aloft, as full of cunning 
and conceit as that world-famous ancestor of his, whose deeds of 
unchivalry were the delight, if not the model, of knight and 
kaiser, lady and burgher, in the Middle Age. 

Suddenly he halts at the great gate of Malepartus ; examines 
it with his nose ; goes on to a postern : examines that also, and 
then another and another ; while I perceive afar, projecting from 
every cave's mouth, the red and green end of a new fir-fagot. 
Ah Reinecke ! fallen is thy conceit, and fallen thy tail therewith. 
Thou hast worse foes to deal with than Bruin the bear, or Ise- 
grim the wolf, or any foolish brute whom thy great ancestor 
outwitted. Man the many-counselled has been beforehand with 
thee ; and the earths are stopped. 

One moment he sits down to meditate, and scratches those 
trusty counsellors, his ears, as if he would tear them off, "revolv- 
ing swift thoughts in a crafty mind." 

He has settled it now. He is up and off — and at what a pace ! 
Out of the way, Fauns and Hamadryads, if any be left in the 
forest. What a pace ! And with what a grace beside ! 

Oh Reinecke, beautiful thou art, of a surety, in spite of thy 
great naughtiness. Art thou some fallen spirit, doomed to be 
hunted for thy sins in this life, and in some future life rewarded 
for thy swiftness, and grace, and cunning, by being made a very 
messenger of the immortals ? Who knows ? Not I. 

I am rising fast to Pistol's vein. Shall I ejaculate ? Shall I 
notify ? Shall I waken the echoes ? Shall I break the grand 
silence by that scream which the vulgar view-halloo call ? 

It is needless ; for louder and louder every moment swells up 
a sound which makes my heart leap into my mouth, and my 
mare into the air. 

Music ? Well-beloved soul of Hullah, would that thou wert 
here this day, and not in St. Martin's Hall, to hear that chorus, 
as it pours round the fir-stems, rings against the roof above, 
shatters up into a hundred echoes, till the air is live with sound ! 
You love madrigals, and whatever Weelkes, or Wilbye, or Or- 
lando Gibbons sang of old. So do I. Theirs is music fit for 
men : worthy of the age of heroes, of Drake and Raleigh, 
Spenser and Shakspeare : but oh that you could hear this mad- 
rigal ! If you must have " four parts," then there they are. 
Deep-mouthed bass, rolling along the ground ; rich joyful tenor ; 
wild wistful alto ; and leaping up here and there above the 
throng of sounds, delicate treble shrieks and trills of trembling 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 409 

joy. I know not whether you can fit it into your laws of music, 
any more than you can the song of that Ariel sprite who dwells 
in the Eolian harp, or the roar of the waves on the rock, or 

Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, 
And murmur of innumerable bees. 

But music it is. A madrigal ? Rather a whole opera of Der 
Freischutz — daemonic element and all — to judge by those red 
lips, fierce eyes, wild, hungry voices ; and such as should make 
Reinecke, had he strong aesthetic sympathies, well content to be 
hunted from his cradle to his grave, that such sweet sounds 
might by him enrich the air. Heroes of old were glad to 
die, if but some votes sacer would sing their fame in worthy 
strains ; and shalt not thou too be glad, Reinecke ? Content 
thyself with thy fate. Music soothes care ! let it soothe thine, as 
thou runnest for thy life ; thou shalt have enough of it in the 
next hour. For as the Etruscans (says Athenaeus) were so 
luxurious that they used to flog their slaves to the sound of the 
flute, so shall luxurious Chanter and Challenger, Sweet-lips and 
Melody, eat thee to the sound of rich organ-pipes, that so thou 
mayest, 

Like that old fabled swan, in music die. 

And now appear, dim at first and distant, but brightening and 
nearing fast, many a right good fellow and many a right good 
horse. I know three out of four of them, their private histories, 
the private histories of their horses : and could tell you many a 
good story of them ; but shall not, being an English gentleman, 
and not an American litterateur. They are not very clever, or 
very learned, or very any thing, except gallant men : but they 
are good enough company for me, or any one ; and each has his 
own specialite, for which I like him. That huntsman I have 
known for fifteen years, and sat many an hour beside his father's 
death-bed. I am godfather to that whip's child. I have seen 
the servants of the hunt, as I have the hounds, grow up round 
me for two generations, and I look on them as old friends — and 
like to look into their brave, honest, weather-beaten faces. That 
red coat there, I knew him when he was a school-boy ; and now 
he is a captain in the Guards, and won his Victoria Cross at 
Inkermann : that bright ^reen coat is the best farmer, as well as 
the hardest rider, for many a mile round ; one who plays, as he 
works, with all his might, and might have made a beau sabreur 
and colonel of dragoons. So might that black coat, who now 
brews good beer, and stands up for the poor at the Board of 
Guardians, and rides, like the green coat, as well as he works. 

18 



410 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

That other black coat is a county banker ; but he knows more 
of the fox than the fox knows of himself, and where the hounds 
are, there will he be this day. That red coat has hunted kanga- 
roo in Australia ; that one has— but what matter to you who 
each man is ? Enough that each can tell me a good story, wel- 
come me cheerfully, and give me out here, in the wild forest, the 
wholesome feeling of being at home among friends. 

And I am going with them ? 

Certainly. He who falls in with hounds running, and follows 
them not as far as he can (business permitting, of course, in a 
business country,) is either more or less than man. SoT, who 
am neither more nor less, but simply a man like my neighbours, 
turn my horse's head to go. 

There is music, again, if you will listen, in the soft tread of 
these hundred horse-hoofs upon the spungy, vegetable soil. They 
are trotting now in " common time." You may hear the whole 
Croats' March (the finest trotting march in the world) played by 
those iron heels ; the time, as it does in the Croats' March, break- 
ing now and then, plunging, jingling, struggling through heavy 
ground, bursting for a moment into a jubilant canter as it reaches 
a sound spot. But that time does not last long. The hounds 
feather a moment round Malepartus, puzzled by the windings of 
Reinecke's footsteps. Look at Virginal, five yards ahead of the 
rest, as her stem flourishes, and her pace quickens. Hark to 
Virginal ! as after one whimper, she bursts out full-mouthed, 
and the rest dash up and away in chorus, madder than ever, and 
we after them up the ride. 

Listen to the hoof-tune now. The common time is changed 
to triple ; and the heavy, steady thud — thud — thud — tells one 
even blindfold that we are going. * * * * 

Going, and " going to go." For a mile of ride have I gal- 
loped, tangled among men and horses, and cheered by occasional 
glimpses of the white-spotted backs in front ; and every minute 
the pace quickens. I^ow the hounds swing off the ride, and 
through the fir-trees ; and now it shall be seen who can ride the 
winter-garden. 

I make no comparisons. I feel due respect for " the counties." 
I have tasted of old, though sparingly, the joys of grass ; but 
this I do say, as said the gentlemen of the New Forest fifty 
years ago, in the days of its glory, when the forest and the court 
were one, that a man may be able to ride in Leicestershire, and 
yet not able to ride in the forest. It is one thing to race over 
grass, light or heavy, seeing a mile ahead of you, and coming up 
to a fence which, however huge is honest, and another to ride 
where we are going now. If you will pay money enough for 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 411 

your horses ; if you will keep them in racing condition ; and 
having done so, simply stick on, (being, of course, a valiant man 
and true,) then you can ride grass, and 

Drink delight of battle with your peers, 

or those of the realm, in Leicestershire, Rutland, or Northamp- 
ton. But here more rs wanted, and yet not so much. Not so 
much, because the pace is seldom as great : but more, because 
you are in continual petty danger, requiring continual thought, 
promptitude, experience. There it is the best horse who wins ; 
but here it is the shrewdest man. Therefore, let him who is 
fearful and faint-hearted keep to the rides ; and not only he, but 
he who has a hot horse ; he who has no hand ; he who has no 
heel, or a horse who knows not what heel means ; for this riding 
is more like Australian bush-coursing, or Bombay hog-hunting, 
than the pursuit of the wily animal over a civilized country, as 
it appears in Leech's inimitable caricatures. 

Therefore, of the thirty horsemen, some twenty wisely keep 
the ride, and no shame to them. They can go well elsewhere ; 
they will go well (certainly they will leave me behind) when we 
reach the enclosures three miles off: but here, they are wise. in 
staying on terra fir ma. 

But there are those who face terram infirmam. Off turns our 
master, riding, as usual, as if he did not know that he was riding 
at all, and thereby showing how well he rides. Off turns the 
huntsman ; the brave green coat on the mouse mare ; the brave 
black coat on the black mare. Mark those two last, if you do 
not know the country, for where the hounds are there will they 
be to the last. Off turns a tall Irish baronet ; the red coat who 
has ridden in Australia ; an old gentleman, who has just informed 
me that he was born close to Billesden-Coplow, and looks as if 
he could ride anywhere, even to the volcanoes of the moon, which 
must be a rough country, to look at it through a telescope. Off 
turns a gallant young Borderer, who has seen bogs and wolds 
ere now, but at present grows mustachios in a militia regiment 
at Aldershot : a noble youth to look at. May he prosper this 
day and all days, and beget brave children to hunt with Lord 
Elcho when he is dead and gone. 

And off turn poor humble I, on the old screwed mare. I 
know I shall be left behind, ridden past, possibly ridden over, 
laughed to scorn by swells on hundred-and-fifty-guinea horses ; 
but I know the winter-garden, and I want a gallop. Half an 
hour will do for me ; but it must be a half hour of mad, thought- 
less animal life, and then, if I can go no further, I will walk the 
mare home contentedly, and do my duty in that station of life to 



412 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

which Providence has been pleased to call me. But while my 
hand finds aught to do, I must do it with all my might. Life is 
very short ; and the truest philosophy is, to waste none of it, 
but to cram the maximum of play, as well as of work, into the 
minimum of time. 

So away we go through a labyrinth of fir-stems and, what is 
worse, fir-stumps, which need both your eyes and your horse's at 
every moment; and woe to the u anchorite," as old Bunbury 
names him, who carries his nose in the air, and his fore feet well 
under him. Woe to the self-willed or hard-hided horse who 
cannot take the slightest hint of the heel, and wince hind legs 
or fore out of the way of those jagged points which lie in wait 
for him. Woe, in fact, to all who are clumsy or cowardly, or in 
anywise not " masters of the situation." 

Pleasant riding it is, though, if you dare look anywhere but 
over your horse's nose, under the dark roof, between the red fir- 
pillars, in that rich subdued light. Now we plunge into a gloomy 
dell, wherein is no tinkling rivulet, ever pure ; but instead a bog, 
hewn out into a chess-board of squares, parted by deep nar- 
row ditches some twenty feet apart. Blundering among the 
stems we go, fetlock-deep in peat, and jumping at every third 
stride one of the said uncanny gripes, half-hidden in long has- 
sock grass. Oh Air a ccespitosa, most stately and most variable 
of British grasses, why will you always grow where you are not 
wanted ? Through you the mare all but left her hind legs in 
that last gripe. Through you the red coat ahead of me, avoid- 
ing one of your hassocks, jumped with his horse's nose full butt 
against a fir stem, and stopped, 

As one that is struck dead 
By lightning, ere he falls. 

as I shall soon, in spite of the mare's cleverness. Would we 
were out of this ! 

Out of it we shall be soon. I see daylight ahead at last, bright 
between the dark stems. Up a steep slope and over a bank, 
which is not very big, but being composed of loose gravel and 
peat mould, gives down with the first man who rides at it, send- 
ing him softly head over heels in the heather, and leaving us a 
sheer gap to gallop through, and out on the open moor. 

Grand old moor ! stretching your brown flats right away 
toward Windsor for many a mile. — Far to our right is the new 
Wellington College, looking stately enough here all alone in the 
wilderness, in spite of its two ugly towers and pinched waist. — 
When shall we have a decent public building. I can't stop to 
meditate on so very remote a chance. Close over us is the long 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 413 

fir-fringed ridge of Easthampstead, ending suddenly in Caesar's 
camp ; and we are racing up the Roman road, which the clods 
of these parts, unable to give a better account of it, call the 
Devil's Highway. 

Racing indeed ; for as Reinecke gallops up the narrow heath- 
er fringed pathway, he brushes off his scent upon the twigs at 
every stride, and the hounds race after him, showing no head 
indeed, and keeping for convenience, in one long line upon the 
track ; but going, head up, stems down, at a pace which no horse 
can follow. — I only hope they may not overrun the scent ! 

They have overrun it ; halt, and put their heads down a mo- 
ment. But with one swift cast in full gallop they have hit it off 
again, fifty yards away in .the heather, long ere we are up to 
them ; for those hounds can hunt a fox because they are not 
hunted themselves, and so have learnt to trust themselves, and 
act for themselves ; as boys should learn at school, even at the 
risk of a mistake or two. Now they are showing head indeed, 
down a half cleared valley, and over a few ineffectual turnips, 
withering in the peat, a patch of growing civilization in the heart 
of the wilderness ; and then over the brook — woe's me ! and we 
must* follow — if we can. 

Down we come to it, over a broad sheet of burnt ground, where 
a week ago the young firs were blazing, crackling, spitting tur- 
pentine for a mile on end. Now it lies all black and ghastly, 
with hard charred stumps, like ugly teeth, or caltrops of old, set 
to lame charging knights. Over a stiff furze-grown bank, which 
one has to jump on and off — if one can ; and over the turnip 
patch, breathless. 

Now we are at the brook, dyke, lode, drain, or whatever you 
call it. Much as I value agricultural improvements, I wish its 
making had been postponed for at least this one year. Shall we 
race at it, as at Rosy or Wissendine, and so over in one long- 
stride ? Would that we could ! But racing at it is impossible ; 
for we stagger up to it almost knee-deep in peat, and find it 
some fifteen feet broad and six feet deep of newly-cut yellow 
clay, with a foul runnel at the bottom. The brave green coat 
finds a practicable place, our master another ; and both jump, 
not over, but in ; and then out again, not by a leap, but by claw- 
ings as of a gigantic cat. The second whip goes in before me, 
and somehow vanishes headlong. I see the water shoot up from 
under his shoulders full ten feet high, and his horse sitting dis- 
consolate on his tail at the bottom, like a great dog. However, 
they are up again and out, painted of a fair raw-ochre hue ; and 
I have to follow, in fear and trembling, expecting to be painted 
in like wise. 



414 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Well, I am in, and out again, I don't know how : but this I 
know, that I am in a great bog. Natural bogs, red, brown, or 
green, I know from childhood, and never was taken in by one in 
my life : but this has taken me in, in all senses. Why do peo- 
ple pare and trim bogs before draining them? — thus destroying 
the light coat of tenacious stuff on the top, which Nature put 
there on purpose to help poor horsemen over, and the blanket of 
red bog-moss, which is meant as a fair warning to all who know 
the winter-garden. However, I am no worse off than my neigh- 
bours. Here we are, ten valiant men, all bogged together ; and 
who knows how deep the peat may be ? 

I jump off and lead, considering that a horse plus a man 
weighs more than a horse alone ; so do one or two more. The 
rest plunge bravely on, whether because of their hurry, or like 
Child Waters in the ballad, " for fyling of their feet." 

However, " all things do end," as Carlyle pithily remarks 
somewhere in his French Revolution ; and so does this bog. I 
wish this gallop would end too. How long have we been going ? 
There is no time to take out a watch : but I fancy the mare flags ; 
I am sure my back aches with standing in my stirrups. I be- 
come desponding. I am sure I shall never see this fox killed ; 
sure I shall not keep up five minutes longer ; sure I shall have 
a fall soon ; sure I shall ruin the mare's fetlocks in the ruts. I 
am bored. I wish it was all over, and I safe at home in bed. 

Then why do I not stop ? 

I cannot tell. That thud, thud, thud, through moss and mire, 
has become an element of my being, a temporary necessity, and 
go I must. I do not ride the mare ; the Wild Huntsman, invisi- 
ble to me, rides her ; and I, like Burger's Lenore, am carried 
on in spite of myself, " tramp, tramp along the land, splash, splash 
along the sea." 

By which I do not at all mean that the mare has run away 
with me. On the contrary, I am afraid I have been shaking her 
up during the last five minutes more than once. But the spirit 
of Odin, " the mover," " the goer," (for that is his etymology,) 
whom German sages connect much with the Wild Huntsman, 
has got hold of my midriff and marrow, and go I must, for " The 
Goer " has taken me. 

I look round for the field. Scattered wide we are now ; a red 
coat gleaming like a spark of fire on every knoll, in every dell, 
behind me and before me too ; for some of the road riders have 
caught us up at a turn, and all are going well, though going 
wild. 

What is this before us ? A green wall of self-sown firs, which 
will scatter us still more. 



MY WINTER-GAKDEN. 415 

There they stand in thousands, the sturdy Scots, colonizing 
the desert in spite of frost, and gales, and barrenness ; and 
clustering together, too, as Scotsmen always do abroad, little 
and big, every one under his neighbour's lee, according to the 
good old proverb of their native land, " Caw me, and I'll caw 
thee." 

I respect them, those Scotch firs. I delight in their forms, 
from James the First's gnarled giants, up in Bramshill Park — 
the only place in England where a painter can learn what Scotch 
firs are — down to the little green pyramids which stand up out 
of the heather, triumphant over tyranny, and the strange woes of 
an untoward youth. Seven years on an average have most of 
them spent in ineffectual efforts to become a foot high. Nibbled 
off by hares, trodden down by cattle, cut down by turf-parers, 
seeing hundreds of their brethren cut up and carried off in the 
turf-fuel, they are as gnarled and stubbed near the ground as an 
old thorn-bush in a pasture. But they have conquered at last, 
and are growing away, eighteen inches a year, with fair green 
brushes silver-tipt, reclothing the wilderness with a vegetation 
which it has not seen for — how many thousand years ? 

No man can tell. For when last the Scotch fir was indigenous 
to England, and mixed with the larch, stretched in one vast forest 
from Norfolk into Wales, England was not as it is now. Snow- 
don was, it may be, fifteen thousand feet in height, and from the 
edges of its glaciers the marmot and the musk ox, the elk and 
the bear, wandered down into the Lowlands, and the hyena and 
the tiger dwelt in those caves where fox and badger only now 
abide. And how did the Scotch fir die out ? Did the whole 
land sink slowly from its sub-Alpine elevation into a warmer 
climate below ? Or was it never raised at all ? Did some change 
of the Atlantic sea-flow turn for the first time the warm Gulf 
Stream to these shores ; and with its soft sea-breezes melt away 
the "Age of Ice," till glaciers and pines, marmots and musk oxen, 
perspired to death, and vanished for an CEon ? Who knows ? 
Not I. But of the fact there can be no doubt. Whether as we 
hold traditionally here, the Scotch fir was reintroduced by James 
the First when he built Bramshill for Raleigh's hapless pet, 
Henry the Prince, or whatever may have been the date of their 
reintroduction, here they are and no one can turn them out. In 
countless thousands the winged seeds float down the southwest 
gales from the older trees ; and every seed which falls takes root 
in ground which, however unable to bear broad-leaved trees, is 
ready by long rest for the seeds of the needle-leaved ones. 
Thousands perish yearly ; but the eastward march of the whole, 



416 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

up hill and down dale, is sure and steady as that of Lynceus* 
Goths in Goethe's Helena : — 

Ein lang und breites Volksgewicht, 
Der erste wusste vom letzen nicht. 
Der erste fiel, der zweite stand, 
Des dritten Lanze war zur Hand, 
Ein jeder hnndertfach gestarkt; 
Erschlagene Tausend unbernerkt. 

Till, as you stand upon some eminence, you see, stretching to 
the eastward of each tract of older trees a long cloud of younger 
ones, like a green comet's tail — I wish their substance was as 
yielding this day. Truly beautiful — grand, indeed, to me it is — 
to see young live Nature thus carrying on a great savage process 
in the heart of this old and seemingly all-artificial English land ; 
and reproducing here, as surely as in the Australian bush, a 
native forest, careless of mankind. Still, I wish it were easier 
to ride through. Stiff are those Scotchmen, and close and stout 
they stand by each other, and claw at you as you twist through 
them, the biggest aiming at your head, or even worse, at your 
knees ; while the middle-sized slip their brushes between your 
thigh and the saddle, and the little babies tickle your horse's 
stomach, or twine about his fore-feet. Whish — whish ; I am 
enveloped in what seems an atmosphere of scrubbing-brushes. 
Fain would I shut my eyes : but dare not, or I shall ride against 
a tree. Whish — whish ; alas for the horse which cannot wind 
and turn like a- hare ! Hounds, huntsmen, all are invisible; only 
by the swishing and crashing of boughs right and left do I know 
that there are a dozen men in the same torment as I, and calling 
it, after the manner of Englishmen, sport. 

Plunge — stagger. What is this ? A broad line of ruts ; per- 
haps some Celtic trackway, two thousand years old, now matted 
over with firs ; dangerous enough out on the open moor, when 
only masked by a line of higher and darker heath : but doubly 
dangerous now when masked by dark undergrowth. You must 
find your own way here, mare. I will positively have nothing 
to do with it. I disclaim all responsibility. There are the reins 
on your neck ; do what you will, only do something — and if you 
can, get forward, and not back. 

There is daylight at last, and fresh air. We gallop contemp- 
tuously through the advanced skirmishers of the Scotch invading 
army ; find a practicable trackway through a long dreary yellow 
bog, too wet for firs to root in, and are away again " a streamer." 
Now a streamer is produced in this wise. There is but one pos- 
sible gap in a bank, one possible ford in a brook ; one possible 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 417 

path in a cover ; and as each man has to wait till the man before 
him gets through, and then gallops on, each man loses twenty 
yards or more on the man before him : wherefore, by all laws of 
known arithmetic, if ten men tail through a gap, then will the 
last of the ten find himself two hundred yards behind the fore- 
most, which process several times repeated, produces the phe- 
nomenon called a streamer ; viz : twenty men galloping absurdly 
as hard as they can, in a line half a mile long, and in humours 
which are celestial in the few foremost, contented in the central, 
and gradually becoming darker in the tailmost; till in the last 
man, viz : myself, they assume a hue altogether Tartarean. 

Patter, patter, plunge, plunge, squash, squash. How shall I 
ever catch up those hounds ? Catch up even the middle man of 
that line, of which every man is going as fast as I, and probably 
could go faster, as I am too sure I could not ? 

Pluck and luck may do it. And if not, what matter ? 

Luck may do it. The hounds may turn a little. And so they 
do ; swinging round yon brown brow, alas ! nearly half a mile 
off. Now for it ! Plunge out of the trackway, over the ruts, 
and hold up, old lass, over the open heath. A fig for stumps, 
rabbit burrows, and the trackways of the extinct Celt. Five 
minutes more has brought me abreast of the middle man ; but 
the hounds swing the opposite way, and I have lost rather more 
than I gained. 

Never mind, try it once more. The last tack was to larboard, 
this shall be to starboard ; and I see a slackening in the pace ; and 
with good reason. Before us is the end of the winter-garden, 
whose boundary wall is by no means like that of Milton's Eden ; 
but a huge brown bank, bristling with black willow; and, as is 
the fashion of the winter-garden, the ditch towards the moor. 
Now let pluck supply what luck could not. 

I see the first whip make a rush. What can turn him ? Over 

he goes ; over goes Sir ; over our master ; over the brave 

green coat ; over the brave black one ; over another red coat, 
which must be the Borderer, or the old gentleman from " the 
counties ; " I am too far off, alas ! to see which. But " the rest 
are scattered far and wide, by mount, by stream " — and if it 
were there, " by sea "-—looking for that weaker place — wdiich is 
not to be found. 

Now for it, old woman ! Old as you are, your loins are strong ; 
and you know me, and I you. We pull bridle a little as we near 
the fence ; it will not do to come up blown, and she likes to have 
a good stare at a place before passing it. . . . Well, my dear, 
it is very big : but practicable, in the sense in which Mr. Asshe- 
ton Smith used to apply that epithet ; that is to say, " If you 

18* 



418 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

fall at it, you will probably fall on the right side." " Come along, 
mare ! you know you can do it ; and if you can't, you can try ! " 
Ay, speak to your horse loudly, cheerfully, confidently, if you 
want to know what he can do. The magic of the human voice 
tells on him as well as on man. Silent himself, voice is to him 
a miracle, an inspiration. Think of it. Your horse can't talk ; 
but he finds that you can. He feels that he carries a nobler, a 
wiser being than himself, one who can make him " above himself 
exalt himself," and dares and does — as she will. She is straight 
at it now, her feet on the ditch brink. Steady hand ! and in 
with the spurs. 

A pause, a heave, a long leap, a moment's clawing and strug- 
gling, cowbacked, upon the top of the bank, which seems half an 
hour long ; and we plunge upon our knees into the field, pick 
ourselves up, and away again ; rattling among swede turnips ; 
over a hurdle into a flock of astounded sheep ; and out again, a 
deep drop into a peaty meadow. The mare's fore feet stick 
deep into the turf the moment they touch it, as into tar, and the 
forward impulse sends her gently sprawling on her head. 

Feeling both my heels touch the ground, as I sit in the saddle, 
I consider it time to step on shore. As I lift my leg over, she 
rises indignantly, chucks me head over heels, and stands looking 
at me with surprise and contempt. See what comes of being 
prudent, and thinking of one's wife and family. I had much 
better have sat the mare patiently, and faced the chance of her 
rolling on me. However, she has not (as I expected) trodden 
off the fore shoes with her hind ones ; so there is no great harm 
done, certainly not to my old coat and hat which are long past 
harming. 

The hounds, moreover, have obligingly waited for us two fields 
on. For the cold wet pastures which we are entering do not 
carry the scent as the heather did, in which Reinecke, as he gal- 
loped, brushed off his perspiration against every twig ; and the 
hounds are now flemishing up and down by the side of the 
brown alder-fringed brook which parts the counties. I can hear 
the flap and snort of the dogs' nostrils as they canter round me ; 
and I like it. It is exciting ; but why — who can tell ? 

What beautiful creatures they are, too! Next to a Greek 
statue (I mean a real old Greek one ; for I am a thoroughly 
anti-preraphaelite benighted pagan heathen in taste, and intend 
some day to get up a Cinque-Cento Club, for the total abolition 
of Gothic art) — next to a Greek statue, I say, I know few such 
combinations of grace and strength, as in a fine foxhound. It is 
the beauty of the Theseus — light and yet massive ; and light not 
in spite of its masses, but on account of the perfect disposition of 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 419 

them. I da not care for grace in man, woman, or animal, which 
is obtained (as in the old German painters) at the expense of 
honest flesh and blood. It may be all very pure, and unearthly, 
and saintly, and what not : but it is not healthy ; and therefore 
it is not really High Art, let it call itself such as much as it likes. 
The highest art must be that in which the outward is the most 
perfect symbol of the inward ; and therefore a healthy soul can 
be only exprest by a healthy body ; and starved limbs and a 
hydrocephalus forehead must be either taken as incorrect sym- 
bols of spiritual excellence, or as (what they were really meant 
for) symbols of certain spiritual diseases which were in the Mid- 
dle Age considered as ecclesiastical graces and virtues. Where- 
fore I like pagan and naturalist art ; consider Titian and Correggio 
as unappreciated geniuses, whose excellences the world will in 
some saner mood rediscover ; hold, in direct opposition to Rio, 
that Rafaelle improved steadily all his life through, and that his 
noblest works are not those somewhat simpering Madonnas and 
somewhat impish Bambinos (very lovely though they are,) but 
those great, coarse, naturalist, Protestant cartoons, which (with 
Andrea Mantegna's Heathen Triumph) Cromwell saved for the 
British nation. I expect no one to agree with all this for the 
next quarter of a century ; but after that I have hopes. The 
world will grow tired of pretending to admire Manichsean pictures 
in an age of natural science, and of building churches on the 
Popish model, to be used for Protestant worship ; and art will 
let the dead bury their dead, and beginning again where Michael 
Angelo and Rafaelle left off, work forward into a nobler, truer, 
freer, and more divine school than the world has yet seen — at 
least, so I hope. 

And all this has grown out of those foxhounds. Why not ? 
Theirs is the sort of form which expresses to me what I want art 
to express — Nature not limited, but developed, by high civiliza- 
tion. The old savage ideal of beauty was the lion, type of mere 
massive force. That was succeeded by an over-civilized ideal, 
say the fawn, type of delicate grace. By cunning breeding and 
choosing, through long centuries, man has combined both, and has 
created the foxhound, lion and fawn in one. Look at that old 
hound, who stands doubtful, looking up at his master for advice. 
Look at the severity, delicacy, lightness of every curve. His 
head is finer than a deer's ; his hind legs tense as steel springs ; 
his fore legs straight as arrows : and yet see the depth of chest, 
the sweep of loin, the breadth of paw, the mass of arm and 
thigh ; and if you have an eye for form, look at the absolute 
majesty of his attitude at this moment. Majesty is the only 
word for it. If he were six feet high, instead of twenty-three 



420 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

inches, with what animal on earth could you compare him ? Is 
it not a joy to see such a thing alive ? It is to me, at least. I 
would like to have one in my study all day long, as I would have 
a statue or a picture ; and when Mr. Morrell gave (as they say) 
two hundred guineas for Hercules alone, I believe the dog was 
well worth the money, only to look at. But I am a minute philo- 
sopher. 

Ah ! The hounds are over the brook, and one loud cheerful 
note after another gives promise of another burst. Over we go 
too, stumbling, watchful of water-rats' holes, down the rotten 
bank, wading the brown gravelly stream, and out again into 
another rushy pasture, up which the hounds are slowly picking 
out the scent. There, they have it now, and dash forward all 
together, showing a beautiful head, a " globus," as the old Romans 
called a pulk of irregular horse. You might cover them with a 
sheet, as the saying is, as they gallop up to the next fence. Oh 
that it may last ? 

It does last, through five or six fields, parted by stiff banks 
enough ; and then the hounds vanish among brushwood. I see 
the gentlemen ahead of me "craning," meditative. There is 
something uncanny beyond. 

Uncanny enough. A hollow lane it is, several feet below the 
soil. A hard lane, without a foot of side-turf to save your horse's 
feet. A nasty lane ; a " naughty lane," as the Shakspearians 
would have called it. The green coat gallops off to a gate, and 
pauses. It is nailed up. He pauses, swings his horse round and 
back twenty yards, comes up in a quiet hand canter, and over 
gallantly. Whom a red-coat follows : but no more. Certainly 
not I ; for the mare cannot do timber well ; and if she could I 
see ugly things upon the ground on both sides of that gate, which 
one horse may escape, or two ; but which will give some one a 
fall, probably me ; for the agricultural intellect has here (as in 
most parts) a tendency to mend gate-roads with loose flints, 
brickbats, broken bottles, iron hoops, beef bones, and other abnor- 
mal substances, which make " bad rising and bad falling " — and 
— there is a third hero rolling in the road, with his horse's hind 
legs hung up in the gate ; and when the too-valiant quadruped 
has at last tumbled over it on his nose, and got up again, he 
limps sadly on one of the said hind legs, and his master has to 
lead him dolefully away, and probably consign him to the stable 
for the next month. Hapless that we are ! unless we are content 
to be pounded, into that lane we must leap after all. Well, the 
whip and one or two more have leapt down already, and what 
must be must ; but I must wait a moment, for there is a man on 
his head below me, and a horse on his head also. They pick 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 421 

themselves up. The man examines his horse's knees, and gives 
a grunt of comfort. The poor brute's head has saved his legs, 
and he stands yawing his chin dolefully up and down, apparently 
with a view to ascertaining whether or not his head is broken off. 
The man picks up what was his hat, and on and away again, 
both he and his horse, I am sorry to say, bleeding pretty freely 
about the face. However, he is an Englishman, and " it is all in 
the day's work." 

Warned by my fellow's fate, I jump off, and lead down. The 
old mare relieved of my weight, jumps after me like a dog, and 
we, too, are away again, having lost a great deal of ground. 
But no one expects me to be in the first flight. 

We are in the lane ; and Tom the huntsman, by a desperate 
up leap which no one follows, is out again five minutes since : 
but we gallop up the lane — getting into it was quite enough to 
do. We will leave well alone, and stay in it while we can. 

Out upon a village green, planted with rows of oaks and pop- 
lars, surrounded by the trim sunny cottages of retired London- 
ers, a pleasant oasis in the middle of the wilderness. Across 
the village cricket-ground (we are great cricketers in these parts, 
and long may the good old game live among us,) and then up 
another hollow lane, which leads between damp shaughs and 
copses toward the further moor. 

Curious things to a minute philosopher are these same hollow 
lanes. They set him on archaeological questions, more than he 
can solve ; and he has time to think over them just now, for there 
is no hurry ; the hounds are picking out the scent slowly enough 
over the adjoining fallows, and he has time to meditate how many 
centuries it took to saw through the warm sand-banks this dyke 
ten feet deep, up which he trots, with the oak boughs meeting 
over his head. Was - it ever worth men's while to dig out the 
soil ? Surely not. The old method must have been, to remove 
the softer upper spit, till they got to tolerably hard ground ; and 
then, Macadam's metal being as yet unknown, the rains and the 
wheels of generations sawed gradually deeper and deeper, till this 
road-ditch w r as formed. But it must have taken centuries to do 
it. Many of these hollow lanes, especially those on flat ground, 
must be as old or older than the Conquest. In Devonshire, I am 
sure that they are. But there many of them, one suspects, were 
made, not of malice but of cowardice prepense. Your indigen- 
ous Celt was, one fears, a sneaking animal, and liked to keep 
when he could under cover of banks and hill-sides ; while your 
bold Roman made his raised roads straight over hill and dale, 
" ridge-ways " from which, as from an eagle's eyrie, he could sur- 
vey the conquered lowlands far and wide. It marks strongly the 



422 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

difference between the two races, that difference between the 
Roman paved road, with its established common way for all pas- 
sengers,its regular stations and milestones, and the Celtic track- 
way, winding irresolutely along in innumerable ruts, parting to 
meet again, as if each savage (for they were nothing better) had 
taken his own fresh path when he found the next line of ruts .too 
heavy for his cattle. Around the spurs of Dartmoor I have seen 
many ancient roads, some of them long disused, which could have 
been hollowed out for no purpose but that of concealment. 

But where are the hounds all this time ? There, two fields on 
our left, at a dead stand-still. I am afraid that it would not mat- 
ter much if they were ten fields off. I am beginning to fear 
exceedingly that we shall not kill this fox. The delay is getting 
serious. Some one observes " that he must be a long way ahead 
of us by now ; " and is answered by a general grunt, or groan. 
However, we are on the right side of the hounds. If he has 
gone anywhere, he has gone to the large covers of the southern 
winter-garden, and has crossed our path up above. So we go 
slowly up the hill, till the valley lies beneath us like a long green 
garden between its two banks of brown moor, and through a 
cheerful little green, with red brick cottages scattered all round, 
each with its large neat garden and beehives, and pigs and geese, 
and turf-stack, and dipt yews and hollies before the door, and rosy 
dark-eyed children, and all the simple healthy comforts of a wild 
" heth-cropper's " home. When he can, the good man of the 
house works at farm labour, or cuts his own turf; and when work 
is scarce, he cuts copses and makes heath-brooms, and does a little 
poaching. True, he seldom goes to church, save to be christened, 
married, or buried; but he equally seldom gets drunk. For 
church and public stand together two miles off; so that social 
wants sometimes bring their own compensations with them, and 
there are two sides to every question. 

Hark ! A faint, dreary hollo off the moor above. And then 
another, and another. Up the lane we gallop, trusting to the cry; 
for the clod of these parts delights in the chase like any bare-leg- 
ged Paddy, and casts away fail and fork wildly, to run, shout, 
assist, and interfere in all possible ways, out of pure love. The 
descendant of many generations of broom-squires and deer-steal- 
ers, the instinct of sport is strong within him still, though no 
more of the king's deer are to be shot in the winter turnip-fields, 
or worse, caught by an apple-baited hook hung from an orchard 
bough. He now limits his aspirations to hares and pheasants, 
and too probably once in his life " hits the keeper into the 
river," and reconsiders himself for awhile after over a crank in 
Winchester jail. Well, he has his faults ; and I have mine. 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 423 

But he is a thorough good fellow nevertheless ; quite as good as 
I ; civil, contented, industrious, and often very handsome ; and a 
far shrewder fellow too — owing to his dash of wild forest blood — 
gypsy, highwayman, and what not — than his bullet-headed, and 
Saxen-polled cousin, the pure South Saxon of the Chalk-downs. 
Dark haired he is, ruddy, and tall of bone ; swaggering in his 
youth ; but when he grows old, a thorough gentleman, reserved, 
stately and courteous as a prince. Fifteen years have I lived 
with him hail fellow well met, and never yet had a rude word or 
action from him. 

We canter up to the agriculturist who stands roaring on the 
top of a gate-post, and steadying himself by a tree. 
| " He is just gone on there. Not a quarter of an hour since. 
Along that hedge-row." 

So ? Then, when the hounds are thrown into the field, why 
do they not hit him off? Why does the next field only give a 
hint of his having past ; and the next none at all ? Why are 
we doomed to wander shivering for the next half hour, up and 
down this lane-end, discussing the solemn question as to where 
Reinecke may, can, will, shall, might, could, would, and should 
have gone ; and watching those two sorrowful red coats and 
that sorrowful line of hounds trotting in a great ring below us 
through the fallow fields, while the huntsman's notes of encour- 
agement come up the breeze, fainter, sadder, more hopeless 
every minute? 

Because the scent has failed. And why scent fails, or does 
not fail, and what scent is — and, in short, any thing about the 
matter, man knows — no more than he knows why his own pulse 
beats. It depends on the weather ? Probably. It is best with 
a steady or rising glass ? Possibly. It is best in a southerly 
wind and a cloudy sky ? In some countries. On clays and 
grass, they say. And yet what sings the poet of the immortal 
Billesden Coplow fox, who ran seventy miles on end ? — (there 
were three foxes up though that day:) — 

The wind was northeast, and most bitterly keen ; 
'Twas the worst hunting morning that ever was seen. 

And yet the best scenting day I ever saw on grass was a sunny 
April southwester, when it was so hot the horses could hardly 
breathe or go ; and the best days for the heather are howling 
black northeasters. There is reason to believe that scent lies 
best when the air is colder than the ground ; and I have a scien- 
tific theory, that 

Scent varies inversely as evaporation ; 



424 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

which sounds very fine, and seems to come true — as often as 
other theories do, namely, about once in three times ; quite often 
enough to prove the correctness of any theory, whether zoological 
or theological. So it may stand, though it wont help us to 
recover this fox ; and I am going home. 

Going home. The fox will be hit off probably, for a few 
yards up on the moor to the left ; heard of, probably, to-morrow, 
from some keeper five miles off: but Reinecke will not die this 
day. He will lie safe at a friend's house till nightfall, and trot 
home to Malepartus during the small hours, to brag and crow to 
his admiring spouse over his mighty feats, and how he outwitted 
that dull thing called man ; carefully " remembering to forget/' 
as Peter Pindar has it, that his life was saved, neither by courage 
nor cunning, but by base panic fear of a gaunt sheep-dog, who 
turned and coursed him exactly whither he did not want to go, 
at the top of this very lane. 

Be it so : or be it otherwise ; — what care I ? I have had my 
exercise and pleasure, and shall not have any more such for full a 
week to come ; I have sent more oxygen through my lungs in 
the last hour than I have in the previous eight-and-forty. I have 
given a wholesome stir to that Thumos (translate as you will — 
wrath, spirit, pluck, or otherwise,) which Plato says is the root of 
all virtues. I have indulged for awhile that savage element 
which ought to be in the heart of every man ; for it alone gives 
him the energy by which he civilizes himself. I have overcome 
obstacles and endured dangers ; by doing which alone man 
becometh strong, great, useful, or otherwise worth one brass 
farthing. I have felt myself for half an hour a free man, with a 
right to as much of Noman's Land, which is the whole universe, 
as I could take and hold with four horse-hoofs. I have cast off 
the trammels of society, in as far as they are represented by 
banks, ditches, and hurdles, and have returned awhile to that 
state of nature out of which all civilization came, and to which 
perfect civilization ought in some way to return. In short, I 
have done and seen and thought, things unspeakable — at least so 
I hold. And if I have ridden neither very long nor very well — 
so much the better for me, who can get so much out of so little. 
Here again comes in the advantage of being a minute philoso- 
pher. On the other side of the account, my hat has one more 
dent in it ; but what is one among so many ? I feel, too, a little 
chilly about the small of the back, and shall indulge in a warm 
salt-bath the minute I get home. But my heart is lightened and 
my brain cleared ; and I can go home to the cheerful study and 
write off this epistle to you, old friend, without foul copy or cor- 
rection, so sharpened are my wits by the simple expedient of air 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 



425 



and exercise, idleness and excitement — the only method by which 
the mens sana can be kept inside the corpus sanum. It has been 
a short pleasure, truly, but all the more easily obtained ; and a 
frivolous one, perhaps, in wise folks' eyes ; but then, you know, 
nothing is frivolous to a Minute Philosopher, 



426 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 

[North British Revieiv.] 

There appeared, a few years since, a " Comic History of Eng- 
land" duly caricaturing and falsifying all our great national 
events, and representing the English people, for many centuries 
back, as a mob of fools and knaves, led by the nose in each gen- 
eration by a few arch-fools and arch-knaves. Some thoughtful 
persons regarded the book with utter contempt and indignation ; 
it seemed to them a crime to have written it ; a proof of 
" banausia," as Aristotle would have called it, only to be outdone 
by the writing a " Comic Bible" After a while, however, their 
indignation began to subside ; their second thoughts, as usual, 
were more charitable than their first ; they were not surprised to 
hear that the author was an honest, just, and able magistrate ; 
they saw that the publication of such- a book involved no moral 
turpitude ; that it was merely meant as a jest on a subject on 
which jesting was permissible, and as a money speculation in- a 
field of which men had a right to makq, money ; while all which 
seemed offensive in it, was merely the outcome, and as it were 
apotheosis, of that method of writing English history which has 
been popular for nearly a hundred years. "Which of our 
modern historians," they asked themselves, " has had any real 
feeling of the importance, the sacredness, of his subject ? Any 
real trust in, or respect for, the characters with whom he dealt ? 
Has not the belief of each and all of them been the same — that 
on the whole, the many always have been fools and knaves ; 
foolish and knavish enough, at least, to become the puppets of a 
few fools and knaves who held the reins of power ? Have they 
not held that, on the whole, the problems of human nature, and - 
human history, have been sufficiently solved by Gibbon and 
Voltaire, Gil Bias, and Figaro ? That our forefathers were silly 
barbarians, — that this glorious nineteenth century is the one 
region of light, and that all before was outer darkness, peopled 
by " foreign devils," Englishmen, no doubt, according to the flesh, 

A History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. By 
J. A. Froude. 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 427 

but in spirit, in knowledge, in creed, in customs, so utterly differ- 
ent from ourselves, that we shall merely show our sentimentalism 
by doing aught but laughing at them ? 

On what other principle have our English histories as yet been 
constructed, even down to the children's books, which taught us 
in childhood that the history in this country was nothing but a 
string of foolish wars, carried on by wicked kings, for reasons 
hitherto unexplained, save on that great historic law of Gold- 
smith's, by which Sir Archibald Alison would still explain the 
French Revolution, — 

" The dog, to serve his private ends, 
Went mad, and bit the man? " 

It will be answered by some, and perhaps rather angrily, that 
these strictures are too sweeping ; that there is arising, in a cer- 
tain quarter, a school of history-books for young people of a far 
more reverent tone, which tries to do full honour to the Church, 
and her work in the world. Those books of this school which 
we have seen, we must reply, seem just as much wanting in real 
reverence for the past, as the school of Gibbon and Voltaire. It 
is not the past which they reverence, but a few characters or 
facts eclectically picked out of the past, and for the most part, 
made to look beautiful by ignoring all the features which will not 
suit their preconceived pseudo-ideal. There is in these books a 
scarcely concealed dissatisfaction with the whole course of the 
British mind since the Reformation, and (though they are not 
inclined to confess the fact) with its whole course before the Re- 
formation, because that course was one of steady struggle against 
the Papacy and its anti-national pretensions. They are the out- 
come of an utterly un-English tone of thought ; and the so-called 
" ages of faith " are pleasant and useful to them, principally be- 
cause they are distant and unknown enough to enable them to 
conceal from their readers that in the ages on which they look 
back as ideally perfect, a Bernard and a Francis of Assisi were 
crying all day long, — " O that my head were a fountain of tears, 
that I might weep for the sins of my people ! " Dante was curs- 
ing popes and prelates in the name of the God of Righteousness ; 
Chaucer and Boccaccio were lifting the veil from priestly abomi- 
nations of which we now are ashamed even to read, and Wolsey, 
seeing the rottenness of the whole system, spent his mighty 
talents, and at last poured out his soul unto death, in one long 
useless effort to make the crooked straight, and number that 
which had been weighed in the balances of God, and found for 
ever wanting. To ignore wilfully facts like these, which were 
patent all along to the British nation, facts on which the British 



428 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

laity acted, till they finally conquered at the Reformation, and 
on which they are acting still, and will, probably, act for ever, is 
not to have any real reverence for the opinions or virtues of our 
forefathers ; and we are not astonished to find repeated, in such 
books, the old stock calumnies against our lay and Protestant 
worthies, taken at second-hand from the pages of Lingard. In 
copying from Lingard, however, this party has done no more 
than those writers have who would repudiate any party — almost 
any Christian — purpose. Lingard is known to have been a 
learned man, and to have examined many manuscripts which few 
else had taken the trouble to look at ; so his word is to be taken, 
no one thinking it worth while to ask whether he has either 
honestly read, or honestly quoted, the documents. It suited the 
sentimental and lazy liberality of the last generation to make a 
show of fairness, by letting the Popish historian tell his side of 
the story, and to sneer at the illiberal old notion, that gentlemen 
of his class were given to be rather careless about historic truth 
when they had a purpose to serve thereby ; and Lingard is now 
actually recommended, as a standard authority for the young, 
by educated Protestants, who seem utterly unable to see, that, 
whether the man be honest or not, his whole view of the course 
of British events, since Becket first quarrelled with his king, 
must be antipodal to their own; and that his account of all 
which has passed for three hundred years since the fall of 
Wolsey, is most likely to be (and, indeed, may be proved to be) 
one huge libel on the whole nation, and the destiny which God 
has marked out for it. 

There is, indeed, no intrinsic cause why the ecclesiastical, or 
pseudo-Catholic, view of history should, in any wise, conduce to 
a just appreciation of our forefathers. For not only did our 
forefathers rebel against that conception again and again, till 
they finally trampled it under their feet, and so appear, prima 
facie, as offenders to be judged at its bar; but the conception 
itself is one which takes the very same view of nature as that 
cynic conception of which we spoke above. Man, with the 
Romish divines, is, ipso facto, the same being as the man of Vol- 
taire, Le Sage, or Beaumarchais ;— he is an insane and degraded 
being, who is to be kept in order, and, as far as may be, cured 
and set to work by an ecclesiastical system ; and the only threads 
of light in the dark web of his history are clerical and theurgic, 
not lay and human. Voltaire is the very experimentum crucis 
of this ugly fact. European history looks to him what it would 
have looked to his Jesuit preceptors, had the sacerdotal element 
in it been wanting ; what heathen history actually did look to 
them. He eliminates the sacerdotal element, and nothing re- 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 429 

mains but the chaos of apes and wolves, which the Jesuits had 
taught him to believe was the original substratum of society. 
The humanity of his history — even of his Pucelle d' Orleans — 
is simply the humanity of Sanchez, and the rest of those vingt- 
quatre Peres, who hang gibbeted for ever in the pages of Pascal. 
He is superior to his teachers, certainly, in this, that he has hope 
for humanity on earth ; dreams of a new and nobler life for 
society, by means of a true and scientific knowledge of the laws 
of the moral and material universe; in a word, he has, in the 
midst of all his filth and his atheism, a faith in a righteous and 
truth-revealing God, which the priests who brought him up had 
not. Let the truth be spoken, even though in favour of such a 
destroying Azrael as Yoltaire. And what if his primary con- 
ception of humanity be utterly base ? Is that of our modern his- 
torians so much higher? Do Christian men seem to them, on 
the whole, in all ages, to have had the Spirit of God with them, 
leading them into truth, however imperfectly and confusedly they 
may have learnt his lessons ? Have they ever heard with their 
ears, or listened when their fathers have declared unto them the 
noble works which God did in their days, and in the old time 
before them ? Do they believe that the path of Christendom 
has been, on the whole, the path of life, and the right way, and 
that the living God is leading her therein ? Are they proud of 
the old British worthies ? Are they jealous and tender of the 
reputation of their ancestors ? Do they believe that there were 
any worthies at all in England before the steam-engine and 
political economy were discovered? Do their conceptions of 
past society, and the past generations, retain any thing of that 
great thought which is common to all the Arya races — that is, 
to all races who have left aught behind them better than mere 
mounds of earth — to Hindoo and Persian, Greek and Roman, 
Teuton and Scandinavian, that men are the sons of the heroes, 
who were the sons of God ? Or do they believe, that for civil- 
ized people of the nineteenth century, it is as well to say as 
little as possible about ancestors who possessed our vices without 
our amenities, our ignorance without our science ; who were 
bred, no matter how, like flies by summer heat, out of that ever- 
lasting midden which men call the world, to buzz and sting 
their foolish day, and leave behind them a fresh race which 
knows them not, and could win no honour by owning them, 
and which owes them no more than if it had been produced, as 
midden-flies were said to be of old, by some spontaneous genera- 
tion ? 

It is not likely that any writer in this review will be likely to 
undervalue political economy, or the steam-engine, or any other 






430 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

solid and practical good, which God has unveiled to this genera- 
tion. All that we demand (for we have a right to demand it) 
is, that rational men should believe that our forefathers were at 
least as good as we are ; that whatsoever their measure of light 
was, they acted up to what they knew, as faithfully as we do ; 
and that, on the whole, it was not their fault if they did not 
know more. Even now, the real discoveries of the age are 
made, as of old, by a very few men ; and, when made, have to 
struggle, as of old, against all manner of superstitions, lazinesses, 
skepticisms. Is the history of the Minie rifle one so very com- 
plimentary to our age's quickness of perception, that we can 
afford to throw many stones at the prejudices of our ancestors ? 
The truth is that, as of old, " many men talk of Robin Hood, 
who never shot in his bow p* and many talk of Bacon, who 
never discovered a law by induction since they were born. As 
far as our experience goes, those who are loudest in their jubila- 
tions over the wonderful progress of the age, are those who have 
never helped that progress forward one inch, but find it a great 
deal easier and more profitable to use the results which humbler 
men have painfully worked out, as second-hand capital for hust- 
ings speeches and railway books, and flatter a mechanic's insti- 
tute of self-satisfied youths, by telling them that the least in- 
structed of them is wiser than Erigena or Roger Bacon. Let 
them be. They have their reward. And so also has the patient 
and humble man of science, who, the more he knows, confesses 
the more how little he knows, and looks back with affectionate 
reverence on the great men of old time, — on Archimedes and 
Ptolemy, Aristotle and Pliny, and many another honourable 
man who, walking in great darkness, sought a ray of light, and 
did not seek in vain, as integral parts of that golden chain of 
which he is but one link more ; as scientific forefathers, without 
whose aid his science could not have had a being. 

Meanwhile, this general tone of irreverence for our forefathers 
is no hopeful sign. It is unwise to " inquire why the former 
times were better than these ; " to hang lazily and weakly over 
some eclectic dream of a past golden age ; for to do so is to deny 
that God is working in this age as well as in past ages, that his 
light is as near us now as it was to the worthies of old time. 
But it is more than unwise to boast and rejoice that the former 
times were worse than these ; and to teach young people to say 
in their hearts, " What clever fellows we are, compared to our 
stupid old fogies of fathers ! " More than unwise ; for possibly 
it may be false in fact. To look at the political and moral state 
of Europe at this moment, Christendom can hardly afford to 
look down on any preceding century, and seems to be in want of 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 431 

something which neither science nor constitutional government 
seem able to supply. Whether our forefathers also lacked that 
something, we will not inquire just now ; but if they did, their 
want of scientific and political knowledge was evidently not the 
cause of the defect ; or why is not Spain now infinitely better, 
instead of being infinitely worse off, than she was three hundred 
years ago ? 

At home, too — ; — But on the question whether we are so very 
much better off than our forefathers, Mr. Froude, not we, must 
speak ; for he has deliberately, in his new history, set himself to 
the solution of this question, and we will not anticipate what he 
has to say ; what we would rather insist on now are the moral 
ill effects produced on our young people by books which teach 
them to look with contempt on all generations but their own, and 
with suspicion on all public characters save a few contemporaries 
of their own especial party. 

There is an ancient Hebrew book, which contains a singular 
story, concerning a grandson who was cursed, because his father 
laughed at the frailty of the grandfather. Whether the reader 
shall regard that story (as we do) as a literal fact recorded by 
inspired wisdom, as an instance of one of the great root-laws of 
family life, and therefore of that national life which (as the 
Hebrew book so cunningly shows) is the organic development of 
the family life ; or whether he shall treat it (as we do not) as a 
mere apologue or myth, he must confess that it is equally grand 
in its simplicity, and singular in its unexpected result. The 
words of the story, taken literally and simply, no more justify 
the notion that Canaan's slavery was any magical consequence 
of the old patriarch's anger, than they do the well-known theory, 
that it was the cause of the negro's blackness. Ham shows a 
low, foul, irreverent, unnatural temper toward his father. The 
old man's shame is not a cause of shame to his son, but only of 
laughter. Noah prophesies (in the fullest and deepest meaning 
of that word) that a curse will come upon that son's son ; that 
he will be a slave of slaves, and reason and experience show 
that he spoke truth. Let the young but see that their fathers 
have no reverence for the generation before them, then will they 
in turn have no reverence for their fathers. Let them be taught 
that the sins of their ancestors involve their own honour so little, 
that they need not take any trouble to clear the blot off the 
scutcheon, but may safely sit down and laugh over it, saying, 
u Very likely it is true. If so, it is very amusing, and if not — 
what matter ? " — Then those young people are being bred up in 
a habit of mind which contains in itself all the capabilities of 
degradation and slavery, in self-conceit, hasty assertion, disbe- 



432 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

lief in nobleness, and all the other " credulities of skepticism ; " 
parted from that past from which they take their common origin, 
they are parted also from each other, and become selfish, self- 
seeking, divided, and therefore weak ; disbelieving in the noble- 
ness of those who have gone before them, they learn more and 
more to disbelieve in the nobleness of those around them, and 
by denying God's works of old, come, by a just and dreadful 
Nemesis, to be unable to see his works in the men of their own 
day, to suspect and impugn valour, righteousness, disinterested- 
ness in their contemporaries ; to attribute low motives ; to pride 
themselves on looking at men and things as " men who know 
the world," *so the young puppies style it ; to be less and less 
chivalrous to women, less and less respectful to old men, less and 
less ashamed of boasting about their sensual appetites ; in a word, 
to show all these symptoms which, when fully developed, leave a 
generation without fixed principles, without strong faith, without 
self-restraint, without moral cohesion, the sensual and divided 
prey of any race, however inferior in scientific knowledge, which 
has a clear and fixed notion of its work and destiny. That many 
of these signs are showing themselves more and more ominously 
in our young men, from the fine gentleman who rides in Rotten 
Row, to the boy-mechanic who listens enraptured to Mr. Holy- 
oake's exposures of the absurdity of all human things save Mr. 
Holyoake's . self, is a fact which presses itself most on those who 
have watched this age most carefully, and who (rightly or 
wrongly) attribute much of this miserable temper to the way in 
which history has been written among us for the last hundred 
years. 

Whether or not Mr. Froude would agree with these notions, 
he is more or less responsible for them ; for they have been sug- 
gested by his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to 
the Death of Elizabeth. It was impossible to read the book, 
without feeling the contrast between its tone and that of every 
other account of the times which one had ever seen. Mr. Froude 
seems to have set to work upon the principle, too much ignored 
in judging of the past, that the historian's success must depend 
on his dramatic faculty ; and not merely on that constructive ele- 
ment of the faculty in which Mr. Macaulay shows such astonish- 
ing power, but on that higher and deeper critical element which 
ought to precede the constructive process, and without which 
the constructive element will merely enable a writer, as was once 
bitterly but truly said, " to produce the greatest possible mis- 
representation, with the least possible distortion of fact." That 
deeper dramatic faculty, the critical, is not logical merely, but 
moral, and depends on the moral health, the wideness and hearti- 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 433 

ness of his moral sympathies, by which he can put himself, as 
Mr. Froude has attempted to do, and as we think successfully, 
into the place of each and every character, and not merely feel 
for them, but feel with them. He does not merely describe their 
actions from the outside, attributing them arbitrarily to motives 
which are pretty sure to be the lowest possible, because it is 
easier to conceive a low motive than a lofty one, and to call a 
man a villain, than to unravel patiently the tangled web of good 
and evil of which his thoughts are composed. He has attempted 
to conceive of his characters, as he would if they had been his 
own contemporaries and equals, acting, speaking in his company ; 
and he has, therefore, thought himself bound to act toward 
them by those rules of charity and courtesy, common alike to 
Christian morals, English law, and decent society ; namely, to 
hold every man innocent till he is proved guilty ; where a doubt 
exists, to give the prisoner at the bar the benefit of it ; not to 
excite the minds of the public against him by those insinuative 
or vituperative epithets, which are but adders and scorpions ; 
and on the whole, to believe that a man's death and burial is not 
the least reason for ceasing to behave to him like a gentleman 
and a Christian. We are not inclined to play with solemn 
things, or to copy Lucian and Quevedo in writing dialogues of 
the dead : but what dialogues might some bold pen dash off, 
between the old sons of Anak, at whose coming Hades has 
long ago been moved, and to receive whom all the kings of the 
nations have risen up, and the little scribblers who have fancied 
themselves able to fathom and describe characters to whom 
they were but pigmies ! Conceive a half-hour's interview be- 
tween Queen Elizabeth and some popular lady-scribbler, who 
has been deluding herself into the fancy that gossiping invento- 
ries of millinery are history. ..." You pretend to judge 
me, whose labours, whose cares, whose fiery trials, were beside 
yours, as the heaving volcano beside a boy's firework ? You 
condemn my weaknesses ? Know that they were stronger than 
your strength ! You impute motives for my sins ? Know that 
till you are as great as I have been, for evil and for good, you 
will be as little able to comprehend my sins as my righteousness ! 
Poor marsh-croaker, who wishest not merely to swell up to the 
bulk of the ox, but to embrace it in thy little paws, know thine 
own size, and leave me to be judged by Him who made 
me ! " . . . How the poor soul would shrink back into 
nothing before that lion eye which saw and guided the destinies 
of the world, and all the flunkey-nature (if such a vice exists 
beyond the grave) come out in utter abjectness, as if the ass in 
the fable, on making his kick at the dead lion, had discovered 

19 



434 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

to his horror that the lion was alive and well Spirit of 

Quevedo ! Finish for us the picture which we cannot finish for 
ourselves. 

In a very different spirit from such has Mr. Froude approached 
these times. Great and good deeds were done in them; and it 
has therefore seemed probable to him that there were great and 
good men there to do them. Thoroughly awake to the fact that 
the Reformation was the new birth of the British nation, it has 
seemed to him a puzzling theory, which attributes its success to 
the lust of a tyrant, and the cupidity of his courtiers. It has 
evidently seemed to him paradoxical that a king who was re- 
puted to have been a satyr, should have chosen to gratify his 
passions by entering six times into the strict bonds of matrimony, 
religiously observing those bonds. It has seemed to him -even 
more paradoxical, that one reputed to have been the most san- 
guinary tyrant who ever disgraced the English throne, should 
have been not only endured, but loved and regretted by a tierce 
and free-spoken people ; and he, we suppose, could comprehend 
as little as we can the reasoning of such a passage as the follow- 
ing, especially when it proceeds from the pen of so wise and 
temperate a writer as Mr. Hallam. 

"A government administered with so frequent violations, not 
only of the chartered privileges of Englishmen, but of those still 
more sacred rights which natural law has established, must have 
been regarded, one would imagine, with just abhorrence, and 
earnest longings for a change. Yet contemporary authorities by 
no means answer this expectation. Some mention Henry after 
his death in language of eulogy ; (not only Elizabeth, be it re- 
membered, but Cromwell always spoke of him with deepest 
respect ; and their language always found an echo in the Eng- 
lish heart ;) and if we except those whom attachment to the an- 
cient religion had inspired with hatred to his memory, few seem 
to have been aware that his name would descend to posterity 
among those of the many tyrants and oppressors of innocence, 
w r hom the wrath of Heaven has raised up, and the servility of 
man endured." 

The names of even those few we should be glad to have ; for 
it seems to us, that (with the exception of a few ultra Protes- 
tants, who could not forgive that persecution of the reformers, 
which he certainly permitted, if not encouraged during one period 
of his reign,) no one adopted the modern view of his character, 
till more than a hundred years after his death, when belief in 
all nobleness and faith had died out among an ignoble and faith- 
less generation, and the scandalous gossip of such a light rogue 
as Osborne was taken into the place of honest and respectful 
history. 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 435 

To clear up such seeming paradoxes as these, by carefully 
examining the facts of the sixteenth century, has been Mr. 
Froude's work, and we have the results of his labour in two 
volumes, embracing only a period of eleven years ; but giving 
promise that the mysteries of the succeeding time will be well 
cleared up for us in future volumes, and that we shall find our 
forefathers to have been, if no better, at least no worse men, 
than ourselves. He has brought to the task known talents and 
learning, a mastery over English prose almost unequalled in this 
generation, a spirit of most patient and good-tempered research, 
and that intimate knowledge of human motives and passions 
which his former books have shown, and which we have a right 
to expect from any scholar who has really profited by Aristotle's 
unrivalled Ethics. He has plainly examined every contempo- 
rary document within his reach, and, as he informs us in the pre- 
face, he has been enabled, through the kindness of Sir Francis 
Palgrave, to consult a great number of MSS. relating to the 
Reformation, hitherto all but unknown to the public, and referred 
to in his work as MSS. in the Rolls' House, where the originals 
are easily accessible. These, he states, he intends to publish, with 
additions from his own reading, as soon as he has brought his 
history down to the end of Henry the Eighth's reign. 

But Mr. Froude's chief text-book seems to have been State 
Papers and Acts of Parliament. He has begun his work in the 
only temper in which a man can write accurately and well : in 
a temper of trust toward the generation whom he describes. 
The only temper ; for if a man has no affection for the charac- 
ters of whom he reads, he will never understand them ; if he 
has no respect for his subject, he will never take the trouble to 
exhaust it. To such an author the Statutes at large, as the de- 
liberate expression of the nation's will and conscience, will appear 
the most important of all sources of information ; the first to be 
consulted, the last to be contradicted ; the Canon, which is not 
to be checked and corrected by private letters and flying pam- 
phlets, but which is to check and correct them. This seems 
Mr. Froude's theory ; and we are at no pains to confess, that 
if he be wrong, we see no hope of arriving at truth. If these 
public documents are not to be admitted in evidence before all 
others, we see no hope for the faithful and earnest historian ; 
he must give himself up to swim as he may on the frothy stream 
of private letters, anecdotes, and pamphlets, the puppet of the 
ignorance, credulity, peevishness, spite, of any and every gossip 
and scribbler. 

Beginning his history with the fall of Wolsey, Mr. Froude 
enters, of course, at his first step, into the vexed question of 



436 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Henry's divorce : an introductory chapter, on the general state 
of England, we shall notice hereafter. 

A very short inspection of the method in which he handles his 
divorce question, gives one at once confidence in his temper and 
judgment, and hope that one may at last come to some clearer 
understanding of it than the old law gives us, which we have 
already quoted, concerning the dog who went mad to serve his 
private ends. In a few masterly pages he sketches for us the 
rotting and dying Church, which had recovered her power after 
the wars of the Roses, over an exhausted nation, but in form 
only, not in life. Wolsey, with whom he has fair and under- 
standing sympathy, he sketches as the transition minister, " lov- 
ing England well, but loving Rome better," who intends a 
reform of the Church, but who, as the Pope's commissioner for 
that very purpose, is liable to a praemunire, and therefore dare 
not appeal to Parliament to carry out his designs, even if he 
could have counted on the Parliament's assistance in any mea- 
sures designed to invigorate the Church. At last arises in the 
divorce question, the accident which brings to an issue on its most 
vital point the qu estion of Papal power in England, and which 
finally draws down ruin upon Wolsey himself. 

This appears to have happened in the winter of 1526-7. It 
was proposed to marry the Princess Mary to a son of the French 
King. The Bishop of Tarbes, who conducted the negotiations, 
advised himself (apparently by special instigation of the devil) 
to raise a question as to her legitimacy. 

No more ingenious plan for convulsing England could have 
been devised. The marriage from which Mary sprang only 
stood on a reluctant and doubtful dispensation of the Pope's. 
Henry had entered into it at the entreaty of his ministers, con- 
trary to a solemn promise given to his father, and in spite of 
the remonstrances of the Archbishop of Canterbury. No bless- 
ing seemed to have rested on it. All his children had died young, 
save his one sickly girl ; a sure note of divine displeasure in the 
eyes of that coarse-minded Church which has always declared 
the chief, if not the only, purpose of marriage to be the procrea- 
tion of children. 

But more ; to question Mary's legitimacy was to throw open 
the question of succession to a half-a-dozen ambitious competi- 
tors. It was, too, probably to involve England at Henry's 
death, in another civil war of the Roses, and in all the inter- 
necine horrors which were still rankling in the memories of men, 
and probably, also, to bring down a French or Scotch invasion. 
There was, then, too good reason, Mr. Froude shows at length, 
for Wolsey 's assertion to John Cassilis — " If his Holiness, win ch 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 437 

God forbid, shall show himself unwilling to listen to the King's 
demands, to me assuredly it will be but grief to live longer, for 
the innumerable evils which I foresee will follow. . . . Nothing 
before us but universal and inevitable ruin." Too good reason 
there was for the confession of the Pope himself to Gardiner, 
" What danger it was to the realm to have this thing hang in 
suspense. . . . That without an heir-male, &c, the realm was 
like to come to dissolution." Too good reason for the bold as- 
sertion of the Cardinal- Governor of Bologna, that " he knew 
the guise of England as few men did, and that if the King 
should die without heirs-male, he was sure that it would cost 
two hundred thousand men's lives ; and that to avoid this mis- 
chief by a second marriage, he thought, would deserve heaven." 
Too good reason for the assertion of Hall, that " all indifferent 
and discreet persons judged it necessary for the Pope to grant 
Henry a divorce, and, by enabling him to marry again, give 
him the hope of an undisputed heir-male." The Pope had full 
power to do this ; in fact, such cases had been for centuries in- 
tegral parts of his jurisdiction, as head of Christendom. He was 
at once too timid and too time-serving to exercise his acknowl- 
edged authority ; and thus, just at the very moment when his 
spiritual power was being tried in the balance, he chose him- 
self to expose his political power to the same test. Both were 
equally found wanting. He had, it appeared, as little heart to 
do justice among kings and princes, as he had to seek and to 
save the souls of men ; and the Reformation followed as a matter 
of course. 

Through the tangled brakes of this divorce question, Mr. 
Froude leads us with ease and grace, throwing light, and even 
beauty, into dark nooks where before all was mist, not merely by 
his intimate acquaintance with the facts, but still more by his 
deep knowledge of human character, and of woman's even more 
than of man's. For the first time, the actors in this long tragedy 
appear to us as no mere bodiless and soulless names, but as 
beings of like passions with ourselves, comprehensible, coherent, 
organic, even in their inconsistencies. Catherine of Arragon is 
still the Catherine of Shakspeare; but Mr. Froude has given 
us the key to many parts of her story which Shakspeare left 
unexplained, and delicately enough has made us understand 
how Henry's affections, if he ever had any for her — faithfully 
as he had kept (with one exception) to that loveless marriage de 
convena?ice, — may have been gradually replaced by indifference 
and even dislike, long before the divorce was forced on him as a 
question not only of duty to the nation, but of duty to Heaven. 
And that he did see in it this latter light, Mr. Froude brings 



438 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

proof from his own words, from which we can escape only by 
believing that the confessedly honest " Bluff King Plal" had sud- 
denly become a consummate liar and a canting hypocrite. 

Delicately, too, as if speaking of a lady whom he had met in 
modern society (as a gentleman is bound to do,) does Mr. Froude 
touch on the sins of that hapless woman, w T ho played for Henry's 
crown, and paid for it with her life. With all mercy and cour- 
tesy, he gives us proof (for he thinks it his duty to do so) of the 
French mis-education, the petty cunning, the tendency to sensu- 
ality, the wilful indelicacy of her position in Henry's household 
as the rival of his queen, which made her last catastrophe at 
least possible. Of the justice of her sentence he has no doubt, 
any more than of her pre-engagement to some one, as proved by 
a letter existing among Cromwell's papers. Poor thing, if she 
did that which was laid to her charge, and more, she did nothing, 
after all, but what she had been in the habit of seeing the queens 
and princesses of the French court do notoriously, and laugh 
over shamelessly ; while, as Mr. Froude w r ell says, " If we are 
to hold her entirely free from guilt, we place not only the King, 
but the Privy- Council, the Judges, the Lords and Commons, and 
the two Houses of Convocation, in a position fatal to their honour 
and degrading to ordinary humanity ; " (Mr. Froude should have 
added Anne Boleyn's own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, and her 
father, who w T ere on the commission appointed to try her lovers, 
and her cousin, Anthony St. Leger, a man of the very highest 
character and ability, who was on the jury which found a true 
bill against her.) "We cannot," continues Mr. Froude, "ac- 
quiesce without inquiry in so painful a conclusion. The English 
nation, also, as well as she, deserves justice at our hands ; and it 
cannot be thought uncharitable if we look with some scrutiny at 
the career of a person, who, but for the catastrophe with which 
it closed, would not have so readily obtained forgiveness for 
having admitted the addresses of the king, or for having received 
the homage of the court as its future sovereign, while the king's 
wife, her mistress, as yet resided under the same roof." Mr. 
Froude's conclusion is, after examining the facts, the same with 
the whole nation of England in Henry's reign : but no one can 
accuse him of want of sympathy with the unhappy woman, who 
reads the eloquent and affecting account of her trial and death, 
which ends his second volume. Our only fear is, that by having 
thus told the truth, he has, instead of justifying our ancestors, 
only added one more to the list of people who are to be " given 
up " with a cynical shrug and smile. We have heard already, 
and among young ladies, too, who can be as cynical as other 
people in these times, such speeches as, " Well, I suppose he has 



\ 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 439 

proved Anne Boleyn to be a bad creature ; but that does not 
make that horrid Henry any more right in cutting off her head." 
Thus two people will be despised, where only one was before ; 
and the fact still ignored, that it is just as senseless to say that 
Henry cut off Anne Boleyn's head, as that Queen Victoria 
hanged Palmer. Death, and death of a far more horrible kind 
than that which Anne Boleyn suffered, was the established 
penalty of the offences of which she was convicted ; and which 
had in her case this fearful aggravation, that they were offences 
not against Henry merely, but against the whole English nation. 
She had been married in order that there might be an undisputed 
heir to the throne, and a fearful war avoided. To throw into 
dispute, by any conduct of hers, the legitimacy of her own off- 
spring, argues a levity or a hard-heartedness which of itself 
deserved the severest punishment. 

We will pass from this disagreeable topic, to Mr. Froude's 
life-like sketch of Pope Clement, and the endless tracasseries 
into which his mingled weakness and cunning led him, and 
which, like most crooked dealings, ended by defeating their own 
object. Pages 125 and sqq. of Vol. I. contain sketches of him, 
his thoughts and ways, as amusing as they are historically im- 
portant : but we have no space to quote from them. It will be 
well for those to whom the Reformation is still a matter of 
astonishment, to read those pages, and consider what manner of 
man he was, in spite of all pretended divine authority, under 
whose rule the Romish system received its irrecoverable wound. 

But of all these figures, not excepting Henry's own, Woisey 
stands out as the most grand and tragical ; and Mr. Froude has 
done good service to history, if only in making us understand at 
last the wondrous " butcher's son." Shakspeare seems to have 
felt (though he could explain the reason neither to his auditors, 
nor, perhaps, to himself) that Woisey was, on the whole, a hero- 
ical type of man. Mr. Froude shows at once his strength and 
his weakness ; his deep sense of the rottenness of the Church ; 
his purpose to purge her from those abominations which w x ere as 
well known, it seems, to him, as they were afterwards to the 
whole people of England ; his vast schemes for education ; his 
still vaster schemes for breaking the alliance w T ith Spain, and 
uniting France and England as fellow-servants of the Pope, and 
twin-pillars of the sacred fabric of the Church, which helped so 
much toward his interest in Catherine's divorce, as a " means " 
(these are his own words) " to bind my most excellent sovereign 
and this glorious realm to the holy Roman See in faith and 
obedience for ever ; " his hopes of deposing the Emperor, putting 
down the German heresies, and driving back the Turks beyond 



440 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

the pale of Christendom ; his pathetic confession to the Bishop 
of Bayonne, that, " if he could only see the divorce arranged, the 
King remarried, the succession settled, and the laws and the 
Church reformed, he would retire from the world, and would 
serve God the remainder of his days." 

Peace be with him ! He was surely a noble soul ; misled, it 
may be, (as who is not when his turn comes,) by the pride of 
conscious power ; and " though he loved England well, yet loving 
Rome better : " but still it is a comfort to see, either in past or 
in present, one more brother whom we need not despise, even 
though he may have wasted his energies on a dream. 

And on a dream he did waste them, in spite of all his cunning. 
As Mr. Froude, in a noble passage says : — 

" Extravagant as his hopes seem, the prospect of realizing them 
was, humanly speaking, neither chimerical, nor even improbable. He 
had but made the common mistake of men of the world, who are the 
representatives of an old order of things, when that order is doomed 
and dying. He could not read the signs of the times; and confounding 
the barrenness of death with the barrenness of winter, which might be 
followed by a new spring and summer, he believed that the old life- 
tree of Catholicism, which in fact was but cumbering the ground, 
might bloom again in its old beauty. The thing which he called heresy 
was the fire of Almighty God, which no politic congregation of princes, 
no state machinery, though it were never so active, could trample out ; 
and as, in the early years of Christianity, the meanest slave who was 
thrown to the wild beasts for his presence at the forbidden mysteries 
of the Gospel, saw deeper, in the divine power of his faith, into the 
future even of this earthly world than the sagest of his imperial perse- 
cutors, — so a truer political prophet than Wolsey would have been 
found in the most ignorant of those poor men, for whom his police 
were searching in the purlieus of London, who were risking death and 
torture in disseminating the pernicious volumes of the English Testa- 
ment." 

It will be seen from this magnificent passage that Mr. Froude 
is distinctly a Protestant. He is one, to judge from his book ; 
and all the better one, because he can sympathize with whatso- 
ever nobleness, even with whatsoever mere conservatism, existed 
in the Catholic party. And therefore, because he has sympathies 
which are not merely party ones, but human ones, he has given 
the world, in these two volumes, a history of the early Reforma- 
tion altogether unequalled. In this human sympathy, while it has 
enabled him to embalm in most affecting prose the sad story of 
the noble, though mistaken Carthusians, and to make even the 
Nun of Kent interesting, because truly womanly, in her very 
folly and deceit, has enabled him likewise to show us the hearts 
of the early martyrs as they never have been show T n before. 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 441 

His sketch of the Christian brothers, and his little true romance 
of Anthony Dalaber, the Oxford student, are gems of writing ; 
while his conception of Latimer, on whom he looks as the hero 
of the movement, and all but an English Luther, is as worthy of 
Latimer as it is of himself. Written as history should be, dis- 
criminatingly, patiently, and yet lovingly and genially, rejoicing 
not in evil, but in the truth, and rejoicing still more in goodness, 
where goodness can honestly be found. 

To the ecclesiastical and political elements in the English Re- 
formation, Mr. Froude devotes a large portion of his book. We 
shall not enter * into the questions which he discusses therein. 
That aspect of the movement is a foreign and a delicate subject, 
from discussing which a Scotch periodical may be excused. 
North Britain had a somewhat different problem to solve from 
her southern sister, and solved it in an altogether different way : 
but this we must say, that the facts, and still more, the State- 
Papers, (especially the petition of the Commons, as contrasted 
with the utterly benighted answer of the Bishops,) which Mr. 
Froude gives, are such as to raise our opinion of the method on 
which the English part of the Reformation was conducted, and 
make us believe, that in this, as in other matters, both Henry 
and his Parliament, though still doctrinal Romanists, were sound- 
headed practical Englishmen. 

This result is of the same kind as most of those at which Mr. 
Froude arrives. They form altogether a general justification of 
our ancestors in Henry the Eighth's time, if not of Henry the 
Eighth himself, which frees Mr. Froude from that charge of 
irreverence to the past generations, against which we protested 
in the beginning of this Article. We hope honestly that he may 
be as successful in his next volumes as he has been in these, in 
vindicating the worthies of the sixteenth century. Whether he 
shall fail or not, and whether or not he has altogether succeeded, 
in the volumes before us, his book marks a new epoch, and, we 
trust, a healthier and loftier one, in English history. We trust 
that they inaugurate a time in which the deeds of our forefathers 
shall be looked on as sacred heirlooms ; their sins as our shame, 
their victories as bequests to us ; when men shall have sufficient 
confidence in those to whom they owe their existence, to scru- 
tinize faithfully and patiently every fact concerning them, with a 
proud trust, that, search as they may, they will not find much of 
which to be ashamed. 

Lastly, Mr. Froude takes a view of Henry's character, not, 
indeed, new, (for it is the original one,) but obsolete for now 
two hundred years. Let it be well understood, that he makes 
no attempt (he has been accused thereof) to whitewash Henry : 

19* 



442 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

all that lie does is, to remove as far as he can, the modern layers 
of " blackwash," and to let the man himself, fair or foul, be seen. 
For the result he is not responsible : it depends on facts ; and 
unless Mr. Froude has knowingly concealed facts, to an amount 
of which even a Lingard might be ashamed, the result is, that 
Henry the Eighth was actually very much the man which he 
appeared to be to the English nation in his own generation, and 
for two or three generations after his death, — a result which need 
not astonish us, if we will only give our ancestors credit for hav- 
ing, at least, as much common sense as ourselves, and believe 
(why should we not ?) that, on the whole, they understood their 
own business better than we are likely to do. 

The " bloated tyrant," it is confessed, contrived, somehow or 
other, to be popular enough. Mr. Froude tells us the reasons. 
He was not born a bloated tyrant, any more than Queen Eliza- 
beth (though the fact is not generally known) was born a wizened 
old woman. He was, from youth, till he was long past his grand 
climacteric, a very handsome, powerful, and active man, temper- 
ate in his habits, good-humoured, frank and honest in his speech, 
(as even his enemies are forced to confess.) He seems to have 
been, (as his portraits prove sufficiently,) for good and for evil, a 
thorough John Bull ; a thorough Englishman : but one of the 
very highest type. 

" Had he died," says Mr. Froude, " previous to the first agitation of 
the divorce, his loss would have been deplored as one of the heaviest 
misfortunes which had ever befallen this country, and he would have 
left a name which would have taken its place in history by the side of 
the Black Prince, or the Conqueror of Agincourt. Left at the most 
trying age, with his character unformed, with the means of gratifying 
every inclination, and married by his ministers, when a boy, to an 
unattractive woman, far his senior, he had lived for thirty-six years 
almost without blame, and bore through England the reputation of an 
upright and virtuous king. Nature had been prodigal to him of her 

rarest gifts Of his intellectual ability we are not left to 

judge from the suspicious panegyrics of his contemporaries. His 
State Papers and letters may be placed by the side of those of Wolsey, 
or of Cromwell, and they lose nothing by the comparison. Though 
they are broadly different, the perception is equally clear, the expres- 
sion equally powerful ; and they breathe throughout an irresistible 
vigour of purpose. In addition to this he had a fine musical taste, 
carefully cultivated ; he spoke and wrote in four languages ; and his 
knowledge of a multitude of subjects, with which his versatile ability 
made him conversant, would have formed the reputation of any ordi- 
nary man. He was among the best physicians of his age. He was 
his own engineer, inventing improvements in artillery, and new con- 
structions in shipbuilding ; and this not with the condescending inca- 
pacity of a royal amateur, but with thorough workmanlike understand- 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 443 

ing. His reading was vast, especially in theology. He was ' attentive/ 
as it is called, ' to his religious duties/ being present at the services in 
chapel two or three times a clay with unfailing regularity, and show- 
ing, to outward appearance, a real sense of religious obligation in the 
energy and purity of his life. In private he was good-humoured and 
good-natured. His letters to his secretaries, though never undignified, 
are simple, easy, and unrestrained, and the letters written by them to 
him are similarly plain and business-like, as if the writers knew that 
the person whom they were addressing disliked compliments, and chose 
to be treated as a man. He seems to have been always kind, always 
considerate ; inquiring into their private concerns, with genuine in- 
terest, and winning, as a consequence, their sincere and unaffected 
attachment. As a ruler, he had been eminently popular. All his 
wars had been successful. He had the splendid tastes in which the 

English people most delighted ; he had more than once been 

tried with insurrection, which he had soothed down without bloodshed, 

and extinguished in forgiveness And it is certain, that if he 

had died before the divorce was mooted, Henry the Eighth, like the 
Roman emperor said by Tacitus to have been consensu omnium 
dignus imperii nisi imperasset, would have been considered, by pos- 
terity, as formed by Providence for the conduct of the Reformation, 
and his loss would have been deplored as a perpetual calamity." 

Mr. Froude has, of course, not written these words without 
having facts whereby to prove them. One he gives in an im- 
portant note containing an extract from a letter of the Venetian 
ambassador in 1515. At least, if his conclusions be correct, we 
must think twice ere we deny his assertion, that " the man best 
able of all living Englishmen, to govern England, had been set 
to do it by the conditions of his birth." 

" We are bound," as Mr. Froude says, " to allow him the 
benefit of his past career, and be careful to remember it, in inter- 
preting his later actions." " The true defect in his moral consti- 
tution, that ' intense and imperious will/ common to all princes 
of the Plantagenet blood, had not yet been tested." That he did, 
in his later years, act in many ways neither wisely nor well, no 
one denies ; that this conduct did not alienate the hearts of his 
subjects, is what needs explanation ; and Mr. Froude's opinions 
on this matter, novel as they are, and utterly opposed to that of 
the standard modern historians, require careful examination. 
Now we are not inclined to debate Henry the Eighth's character, 
or any other subject, as between Mr. Froude, and an author of 
the obscurantist or pseudo-conservative school. Mr. Froude is a 
Liberal ; and so are we. We wish to look at the question as 
between Mr. Froude and other Liberals : and, therefore, of 
course, first, as between Mr. Froude and Mr. Hallam. 

Mr. Hallam's name is so venerable, and his work so impor- 
tant, that, to set ourselves up as judges in this, or in any matter, 



444 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

between him and Mr. Froude, would be mere impertinence : but 
speaking merely as learners, we have surely a right to inquire, 
why Mr. Hallam has entered on the whole question of Henry's 
relations to his Parliament with a prcejudicium against them ; 
for which Mr. Froude finds no ground whatsoever in fact. All 
acts both of Henry and his Parliament are to be taken in malam 
partem. They were not Whigs, certainly : neither were Soc- 
rates and Plato, nor even St. Paul and St. John. They may 
have been honest men, as men go, or they may not : but why is 
there to be a feeling against them, rather than for them ? Why 
is Henry always called a tyrant, and his Parliament servile ? 
The epithets have become so common and unquestioned, that our 
interrogation may seem startling. Still we make it. Why was 
Henry a tyrant ? That may be true, but must be proved by 
facts. Where are they ? Is the mere fact of a monarch's ask- 
ing for money a crime in him and in his ministers ? The ques- 
tion would rather seem to be, Were the moneys for which Henry 
asked needed or not, and when granted, were they rightly or 
wrongly applied ? And on these subjects we want much more 
information than we obtain from Mr. Hallam's epithets. The 
author of a constitutional history should rise above epithets ; or, 
if he uses them, should corroborate them by facts. Why should 
not Mr. Hallam be as fair and as cautious in accusing Henry 
and Wolsey, as he would be in accusing Queen Victoria and 
Lord Palmerston ? What right, allow us to ask, has a grave 
constitutional historian to say, that " We cannot, indeed, doubt, 
that the unshackled and despotic condition of his friend, Francis 
the First, afforded a mortifying contrast to Henry ? " What 
document exists, in which Henry is represented as regretting 
that he is the king of a free people ? — for such Mr. Hallam con- 
fesses just above, England was held to be, and was actually, in 
comparison of France. If the document does not exist, Mr. 
Hallam has surely stepped out of the field of the historian into 
that of the novelist, a la Scott or Dumas. The Parliament 
sometimes grants Henry's demands ; sometimes it refuses them, 
and he has to help himself by other means. Why are both cases 
to be interpreted in malam partem ? Why is the Parliament's 
granting to be always a proof of its servility ? — its refusing, 
always a proof of Henry's tyranny and rapacity ? Both views 
are mere prcejudicta, reasonable perhaps, and possible : but why 
is a prcejudium of the opposite kind as rational and as possible ? 
Why has not a historian a right to start, as Mr. Froude does, 
by taking for granted, that both parties may have been on the 
whole right ; that the Parliament granted certain sums, because 
Henry was right in asking for them ; refused others because 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 445 

Henry was wrong ; even that, in some cases, Henry may have 
been right in asking, the Parliament wrong in refusing ; and 
that in such a case, under the pressure of critical times, Henry 
was forced to get, as he could, the money, which he saw that the 
national cause required ? Let it be as folks will. Let Henry 
be sometimes right, and the Parliament sometimes likewise ; or 
the Parliament always right, or Henry always right; or any 
thing else, save this strange diseased theory, that both must have 
been always wrong, and that, evidence to that effect failing, 
motives must be insinuated, or openly asserted, from the writer's 
mere imagination. This may be a dream : but it is as easy to 
imagine as the other, and more pleasant also. It will probably 
be answered (though not by Mr. Hallam himself) by a sneer : 
" You do not seem to know much of the world, Sir. tr So would 
Figaro and Gil Bias have said, Sir ; and on exactly the same 
grounds as you do*?* 

Let us examine a stock instance of Henry's " rapacity " and 
his Parliament's servility, namely, the exactions in 1524 and 
1525, and the subsequent "release of the king's debts," which a 
late writer, — in a Review conducted by University men, and 
therefore, one would have supposed, superior to the stale and 
dangerous habit of reviewing one book by another, — quoted the 
other day, second-hand, out of Hallam, as a " settler " to Mr. 
Froude's view of Henry and his Parliament. What are the 
facts of the case ? France and Scotland had attacked England 
in 1514. The Scotch were beaten at Flodden. The French 
lost Tournay and Therounne, and, when peace was made, agreed 
to pay the expenses of the war. Times changed, and the ex- 
p e?ises were not paid. 

A similar war arose in 1524, and cost England immense sums. 
A large army was maintained on the Scotch border, another 
army invaded France ; and Wolsey, not venturing to call Par- 
liament, — because he was, as Pope's legate, liable to a prae- 
munire, — raised money by contributions and benevolences, which 
were levied, it seems, on the whole, uniformly and equally, (save 
that they weighed more heavily on the rich than on the poor, if 
that be a fault,) and differed from taxes only in not having re- 
ceived the consent of Parliament. Doubtless, this was not the 
best way of raising money ; but what if, under the circumstances, 
it were the only one ? What if, too, on the whole, the money so 
raised was really given willingly by the nation ? The sequel 
alone could decide that. 

The first contribution for which Wolsey asked was paid. The 
second was resisted, and was not paid, proving thereby that the 



446 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

nation need not pay unless it chose. The Court gave way ; and 
the war became defensive only, till 1525. 

Then the tide turned. The danger, then, was not from Francis, 
but from the Emperor. Francis was taken prisoner at Pavia ; 
and shortly after, Rome was sacked by Bourbon. 

The effect of all this in England is told at large in Mr. 
Froude's second chapter. Henry became bond for Francis's 
ransom, to be paid to the Emperor. He spent 500,000 crowns 
more in paying the French army ; and in the terms of peace 
made with France, a sum-total was agreed on for the whole debt, 
old and new, to be paid as soon as possible ; and an annual pen- 
sion of 500,000 crowns beside. The French exchequer, how- 
ever, still remained bankrupt, and again the money was not 
paid. 

Parliament, when it met in 1529, reviewed the circumstances 
of the expenditure, and finding it all such as the nation on the 
whole approved, legalized the taxation, by benevolences, retro- 
spectively ; and this is the whole mare's nest of the first payment 
of Henry's debts ; if, at least, any faith is to be put in the pre- 
amble of the Act for the release of the King's Debts, 21 Hen. 
VIII. c. 24. " The King's loving subjects, the Lords Spiritual 
and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assem- 
bled, calling to remembrance the inestimable costs, charges, and 
expenses which the King's Highness hath necessarily been com- 
pelled to support and sustain since his assumption to his crown, 
estate, and dignity royal, as well for the extinction of a right 
dangerous and damnable schism, sprung in the Church, as for 
the modifying the insatiable and inordinate ambition of them, 
who, while aspiring to the monarchy of Christendom, did put 
universal troubles and divisions in the same, intending, if they 
might, not only to have subdued this realm, but also all the rest, 
unto their power and subjection — for resistance whereof, the 
King's Highness was compelled to marvellous charges — both for 
the supportation of sundry armies by sea and land, and also for 
divers and manifold contribution on hand, to save and keep his 
own subjects at home in rest and repose — which hath been so 
politically handled, that when the most part of all Christian lands 
have been infested with cruel wars, the great Head and Prince 
of the world [the Pope !] brought into captivity, cities and towns 
taken, spoiled, burnt, and sacked — the King's said subjects in all 
this time, by the high providence and politic means of his Grace, 
have been nevertheless preserved, defended, and maintained from 
all these inconvenients, &c. 

"Considering, furthermore, that his Highness, in and about 
the premises, hath been fain to employ not only all such sums of 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 447 

money as hath risen and grown by contributions made unto his 
Grace by his loving subjects — but also, over and above the same, 
sundry other notable and excellent sums of his own treasure and 
yearly revenues, among which manifold great sums so employed, 
his Highness, also, as is notoriously knoivn, and as doth evidently 
appear by the accounts of the same, hath to that use, and 
none other, converted all such money as by any of his subjects hath 
been advanced to his Grace by way of prest or loan, either par- 
ticularly, or by any taxation made of the same — being things so 
well collocate and bestowed, seeing the said high and great fruits 
and effects thereof insured to the surety and commodity and 
tranquillity of this realm — of our mind and consent, do freely, 
absolutely, give and grant to the King's Highness all and every 
sum or sums of money," &c. 

The second release of the King's debts, in 1544, is very simi- 
lar. The King's debts and necessities were really, when we 
come to examine them, those of the nation; in 1538-40 England 
was put into a thorough state of defence from end to end. For- 
tresses were built along the Scottish border, and all along the 
coast opposite France and Flanders. The people were drilled 
and armed, the fleet equipped ; and the nation, for the time, be- 
came one great army. And nothing but this, as may be proved 
by an overwhelming mass of evidence, saved the country from 
invasion. Here were enormous necessary expenses which must 
be met. 

In 1543, a million crowns were to have been paid by Francis 
the First, as part of his old debt. And it was not paid, but, on 
the contrary, Henry had to go to war for it. The nation again 
relinquished their claim, and allowed Henry to raise another be- 
nevolence in 1545, concerning which Mr. Hallam tells us a great 
deal, but not one word of the political circumstances which led 
to it or to the release, keeping his sympathies and his paper for 
the sorrows of refractory Alderman Reed, who, refusing (alone 
of all the citizens) to contribute to the support of troops on the 
Scotch border or elsewhere, was sent down, by a sort of rough 
justice, to serve on the Scotch border himself, and judge of the 
" perils of the nation " with his own eyes ; and being (one is 
pleased to say) taken prisoner by the Scots, had to pay a great 
deal more as ransom than he would have paid as benevolence. 

But to return. What proof is there in all this, of that servil- 
ity which most historians, and Mr. Hallam among the rest, are 
wont to attribute to Henry's Parliaments ? What feeling appears 
on the face of this document, which we have given and quoted, 
but one honourable to the nation ? Through the falsehood of a 
foreign nation, the King is unable to perform his engagements to 



448 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

the people. Is not the just and generous course in such a case, 
to release him from those engagements? Does this preamble, 
does a single fact of the case, justify historians in talking of 
these " king's debts " in just the same tone as that in which they 
would have spoken of George the Fourth's or the Duke of 
York's ? as if the King had squandered the money on private 
pleasures ? Perhaps most people who write small histories, be- 
lieve that this really was the case. They certainly would gather 
no other impression from the pages of Mr. Hallam. No doubt, 
the act must have been burdensome on some people. Many, we 
are told, had bequeathed their promissory notes to their children, 
used their reversionary interest in the loan in many ways ; and 
these, of course, felt the change very heavily. No doubt ; but 
why have we not a right to suppose that the Parliament were 
aware of that fact; but chose it as the less of the two evils? 
The King had spent the money ; he was unable to recover it 
from Francis, could only refund it by raising some fresh tax or 
benevolence ; and why may not the Parliament have considered 
the release of old taxes likely to offend fewer people than the 
imposition of new ones ? It is, certainly, an ugly thing to break 
public faith ; but to prove that public faith was broken, we must 
prove that Henry compelled the Parliament to release him ; if 
the act was of their own free will, no public faith was broken, 
for they were the representatives of the nation, and through 
them, the nation forgave its own debt. And what evidence have 
we that they did not represent the nation, and that, on the whole, 
we must suppose, as we should in the case of any other men, 
that they best knew their own business ? May we not apply to 
this case, and to others, mutatis mutandis, the argument which 
Mr. Froude uses so boldly and well in the case of Anne Boleyn's 
trial — " The English nation also, as well as . . . deserves justice 
at our hands" 

Certainly it does ; but it is a disagreeable token of the method 
on which we have been accustomed to write the history of our 
own forefathers, that Mr. Froude should find it necessary to state 
formally so very simple a truth. 

What proof, we ask again, is there that this old parliament 
was " servile ? " Had that been so, Wolsey would not have 
been afraid to summon it. The specific reason for not summon- 
ing a Parliament for six years after that of 1524, was, that they 
were not servile ; that when (here we are quoting Mr. Hallam, 
and not Mr. Froude) Wolsey entered the House of Commons 
with a great train, seemingly for the purpose of intimidation, 
they " made no other answer to his harangues, than that it was 
their usage to debate only among themselves." The debates on 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 449 

this occasion lasted fifteen or sixteen days, during which, says an 
eye-witness, "there has been the greatest and sorest hold in the 
Lower House, ' the matter debated and beaten ;' such hold that 
the House was like to have been dissevered ;" in a word, hard 
fighting (and why not honest fighting ?) between the court party 
and the opposition, u which ended," says Mr. Hallam, " in the 
court party obtaining, with the utmost difficulty, a grant much 
inferior to the Cardinal's original requisition." What token of 
servility is here ? 

And is it reasonable to suppose, that after Wolsey was con- 
quered, and a comparatively popular ministry had succeeded, 
and that memorable Parliament of 1529, (which Mr. Froude, 
not unjustly, thinks more memorable than the Long Parliament 
itself,) began its great work with a high hand, backed not merely 
by the King, but by the public opinion of the majority of Eng- 
land, their decisions are likely to have been more servile than 
before ? If they resisted the King when they disagreed with 
him, are they to be accused of servility because they worked 
with him when they agreed with him ? Is an opposition always 
in the right ; a ministerial party always in the wrong ? Is it an 
offence against the people to agree with a monarch, even when 
he agrees with the people himself? Simple as these questions 
are, one must really stop to ask them. 

No doubt, pains were often taken to secure elections favour- 
able to the Government. Are none taken now ? Are not more 
taken now ? Will any historian show us the documents which 
prove the existence, in the sixteenth century, of Reform Club, 
Carlton Club, whippers-in and nominees, governmental and op- 
position, and all the rest of the beautiful machinery which pro- 
tects our Reformed Parliament from the evil influences of bribery 
and corruption ? Pah ! — We have somewhat too much glass in 
our modern House, to afford to throw stones at our forefathers' 
old St. Stephen's. At the worst, what was done then but that 
without which it is said to be impossible to carry on a govern- 
ment now ? Take an instance from the Parliament of 1539, one 
in which there is no doubt Government influence was used, in 
order to prevent as much as possible the return of members 
favourable to the clergy — for the good reason, that the clergy 
were no doubt on their own side intimidating voters by all those 
terrors of the unseen world, which had so long been to them a 
source of boundless profit and power. 

Cromwell writes to the King to say that he has secured a 
seat for a certain Sir Richard Morrison, but for what purpose ? 
As one who no doubt " should be ready to answer and take up 
such as should crack or face with literature of learning, if any 



450 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

such should be." There was, then, free discussion; they ex- 
pected clever and learned speakers in the opposition, and on 
subjects of the deepest import, not merely political but spiritual; 
and the Government needed men to answer such. What more 
natural, than that so close on the " pilgrimage of grace," and in 
the midst of so great dangers, at home and abroad, the Govern- 
ment should have done their best to secure a well-disposed 
House, (one w r ould like to know w T hen they would not?) but 
surely the very effort, (confessedly exceptional,) and the acknowl- 
edged difficulty, prove that Parliament were no mere " registrars 
of edicts." 

But the strongest argument against the tyranny of the Tudors, 
and especially of Henry VIII. in his " benevolences," is derived 
from the state of the people themselves. If these benevolences 
had been really unpopular, they would not have been paid. In 
one case, we have seen, a benevolence was not paid for that very 
reason. For the method of the Tudor sovereigns, like that of 
their predecessors, was the very opposite to that of tyrants, in 
every age and country. The first act of a tyrant has always 
been to disarm the people, and to surround themselves with a 
standing army. The Tudor method was, as Mr. Froude shows 
us by many interesting facts, to keep the people armed and 
drilled, even to compel them to learn the use of weapons. 
Throughout England spread one vast military organization, which 
made every adult a soldier, and enabled him to find, at a day's 
notice, his commanding officer, landlord, sheriff, or lieutenant of 
the county ; so that, as a foreign ambassador of the time remarks 
with astonishment, (we quote from memory,) " England is the 
strongest nation on earth, for though the King has not a single 
mercenary soldier, he can raise in three days an army of two 
hundred thousand men." 

And of w T hat temper those men were is well known enough. 
Mr. Froude calls them (and we beg leave to indorse, without 
exception, Mr. Froude's opinion,) "A sturdy high-hearted race, 
sound in body, and fierce in spirit, and furnished with thews and 
sinews, which, under the stimulus of those * great shins of beef,' 
their common diet, were the wonder of the age." " What comyn 
folke in all this world," says a state-paper in 1815, "may com- 
pare with the comyns of England in riches, freedom, liberty, 
welfare, and all prosperity ? What comyn folke is so mighty, so 
strong in the felde, as the comyns of England ? " In stories of 
authentic actions under Henry VIII., (and we will add, under 
Elizabeth likewise,) where the accuracy of the account is unde- 
niable, no disparity of force made Englishmen shrink from ene- 
mies whenever they could meet them. Again and again a few 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 451 

thousands of them carried dismay into the heart of France. 
Four hundred adventurers, vagabond apprentices of London, 
who formed a volunteer corps in the Calais garrison, were for 
years (Hall says) the terror of Normandy. In the very frolic 
of conscious power they fought and plundered, without pay, 
without reward, save what they could win for themselves ; and 
when they fell at last, they fell only when surrounded by six 
times their number, and were cut to pieces in careless despera- 
tion. Invariably, by friend and foe alike, the English are de- 
scribed as the fiercest people in all Europe, (English wild beasts, 
Benvenuto Cellini calls them ;) and this great physical power 
they owed to the profuse abundance in which they lived, to the 
soldier's training, in which every one of them was bred from 
childhood. 

Mr. Froude's novel assertion about profuse abundance must 
be weighed by those who have read his invaluable introductory 
chapter. But we must ask at once, how was it possible to levy 
on such a populace a tax which they were determined not to 
pay, and felt that they were not bound to pay, either in law or 
justice ? Conceive Lord Palmerston's sending down to demand 
a " benevolence " from the army at Aldershot, beginning with 
the General in command, and descending to the privates. . . . 
What would be the consequences ? Ugly enough : but gentle 
in comparison with those of any attempt to exact a really un- 
popular tax from a nation of well-armed Englishmen, unless 
they, on the whole, thought the tax fit to be paid. They would 
grumble, of course, whether they intended to pay or not — for 
were they not Englishmen, our own flesh and blood? — and 
grumble all the more in person, because they had no press to 
grumble for them : but what is there in the M. P.'s letter to 
Lord Surrey, quoted by Mr. Hallam, p. 25, or in the more 
pointed letter of Warham's, two pages on, which we do not see 
lying on our breakfast tables in half the newspapers every week ? 
Poor, pedantic, obstructive, old Warham, himself very angry at 
so much being asked of his brother clergymen, and at their being 
sworn as to the value of their goods, (so like are old times to 
new ones ;) and being, on the w r hole, of opinion, that the world 
(the Church included) is going to the devil, says, that as he has 
been " showed in a secret manner of his friends, the people sore 
grudgeth and murmureth, and speaketh cursedly among them- 
selves, as far as they dare, saying that they shall never have 
rest of payments as long as some liveth, and that they had better 
die than be thus continually handed, reckoning themselves, their 
wives and children, as despoulit, and not greatly caring what they 
do, or what becomes of them." 



452 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

Yery dreadful — if true ; which last point depends very much 
upon who Warham was. Now, on reading Mr. Froude's, or any 
other good history, we shall find that Warham was one of the 
leaders of that party (which will always have its antitype in 
England) represented now by Blackwood's Magazine, the Stand- 
ard, and the Morning Herald. Have we, too, not heard within 
the last seven years, similar prophecies of desolation, mourning, 
and woe — of the Church tottering on the verge of ruin, the 
peasantry starving under the horrors of free-trade, noble families 
reduced to the verge of beggary by double income-tax. Even 
such a prophet seems Warham to have been — of all people 
in that day, one of the last whom one would have asked for an 
opinion. 

Poor old Warham, however, was not so far wrong in this 
particular case ; for the " despoulit " slaves of Suffolk, not con- 
tent with grumbling, rose up with sword and bow, and vowed 
that they would not pay. Whereon the bloated tyrant sent his 
praetorians, and enforced payment by scourge and thumbscrew ? 
Not in the least. They would not pay ; and, therefore, being 
free men, nobody could make them pay ; and although in the 
neighbouring county of Norfolk, from twenty pounds (i. e. £200 
of our money) upward, (the tax was not levied on men of less 
substance,) there were not twenty but what had' consented ; 
and though there was " great likelihood that this grant should 
be much more than the loan was," (the " salt tears " shed by 
the gentlemen of Norfolk proceeding, says expressly the Duke 
of Norfolk, " only from doubt how to find money to content the 
king's Highness,") the king and Wolsey gave way frankly and 
at once, and the contribution is remitted, although the Dukes of 
Norfolk and Suffolk, writing to Wolsey, treat the insurrection 
lightly, and seem to object to the remission as needless. 

From all which facts (they are Mr. Hallam's, not Mr. Froude's) 
we can deduce not tyranny, but lenity, good sense, and the frank 
withdrawal from a wrong position, as soon as the unwillingness 
of the people proved it to be a wrong one. 

This instance is well brought forward (though only in a line 
or two, by Mr. Froude) as one among many proofs that the 
working-classes in Henry the Eighth's time "enjoyed an abun- 
dance far beyond that which in general falls to the lot of that 
order in long-settled countries, incomparably beyond what the 
same class were enjoying at that very time in Germany or 
France. The laws secured them; and that the laws were put 
in force, we have the direct evidence of successive acts of the 
legislature, justifying the general policy by its success ; and we 
have also the indirect evidence of the contented loyalty of the 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 453 

great body of the people, at a time when, if they had been dis- 
contented, they held in their own hands the means of asserting 
what the law acknowledged to be their right. The Government " 
(as we have just shown at length) " had no power to compel 

injustice If the peasantry had been suffering under any 

real grievances, we should have heard of them when the religious 
rebellions furnished so fair an opportunity to press them forward. 
Complaint was loud enough, when complaint was just, under the 
Somerset Protectorate.'' 

Such broad facts as these (for facts they are) ought to make 
us pause ere we boast of the greater liberty enjoyed by English- 
men of the present day, as compared with the tyranny of Tudor 
times. Thank God, there is no lack of that blessing now ; but 
was there any real lack of it then? Certainly, the outward 
notes of a tyranny exist now in far greater completeness than 
then. A standing army, a Government police, ministries who 
bear no love to a militia, and would consider the compulsory 
arming and drilling of the people as a dangerous insanity, do not 
look at first sight as much like " free institutions " as a Govern- 
ment which, though again and again in danger not merely of 
rebellion, but of internecine wars of succession, so trusted the 
people, as to force weapons into their hands from boyhood. Let 
us not be mistaken ; we are no hankerers after retrogression ; 
the present system works very well ; let it be ; all that we say is, 
that the imputation of despotic institutions lies, prima facie, 
rather against the reign of Queen Victoria than against that of 
King Henry the Eighth. Of course, it is not so in fact. Many 
modern methods, which are despotic in appearance, are not so in 
practice. Let us believe that the same was the case in the six- 
teenth century. Our governors now understand their own busi- 
ness best, and make a very fair compromise between discipline 
and freedom. Let us believe that the men of the sixteenth cen- 
tury did so likewise. All we ask is, that our forefathers should 
be judged as we wish to be judged ourselves, " not according to 
outward appearance, but with righteous judgment." 

Mr. Froude finds the cause of this general contentment and 
loyalty of the masses, in the extreme care which the government 
took of their well-being. The introductory chapter, in which he 
proves to his own satisfaction the correctness of his opinion, is 
well worth the study of our political economists. The facts 
which he brings seems certainly overwhelming; of course, they 
can only be met by counter-facts ; and our knowledge does not 
enable us either to corroborate or refute his statements. The 
chief argument used against them seem to us, at least, to show, 
that for some cause or other, the working-classes were prosper- 



454 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

ous enough. It is said the Acts of Parliament regulating wages 
do not fix the minimum of wages, but the maximum. They are 
not intended to defend the employed against the employer, but 
the employer against the employed, in a defective state of the 
labour-market, when the workmen, by the fewness of their num- 
bers, were enabled to make extravagant demands. Let this be 
the case, (we do not say that it is so,) what is it but a token of 
prosperity among the working-classes ? A labour-market so thin 
that workmen can demand their own price for their labour, till 
Parliament is compelled to bring them to reason, is surely a time 
of prosperity to the employed, — a time of full work and high 
wages ; of full stomachs, inclined from very prosperity to " wax 
fat and kick." If, however, any learned statistician should be 
able to advance, on the opposite side of the question, enough to 
weaken some of Mr. Froude's conclusions, he must still, if he be 
a just man, do honour to the noble morality of this most striking 
chapter, couched as it is in as perfect English as we have ever 
had the delight of reading. We shall leave, then, the battle of 
facts to be fought out by statisticians, always asking Mr. Froude's 
readers to bear in mind, that though other facts may be true, 
yet his facts are no less true likewise, and shall quote at length, 
both as a specimen of his manner and of matter, the last three 
pages of this introductory chapter, in which, after speaking of the 
severity of the laws against vagrancy, and showing how they 
were excused by the organization which found employment for 
every able-bodied man, he goes on to say, — 

" It was, therefore, the expressed conviction of the English nation, 
that it was better for a man not to live at all than to live a profitless 
and worthless life. The vagabond was a sore spot upon the common- 
wealth, to be healed by wholesome discipline if the gangrene was not 
incurable ; to be cut away with the knife, if the milder treatment of 
the cart-whip failed to be of profit. 

U A measure so extreme in its severity was partly dictated by policy. 
The state of the country was critical ; and the danger from question- 
able persons traversing it unexamined and uncontrolled was greater 
than at ordinary times. But in point of justice as well as of prudence, 
it harmonized with the iron temper of the age, and it answered well 
for the government of a fierce and powerful people, in whose hearts 
lay an intense hatred of rascality, and among whom no one could 
have lasped into evil courses except by deliberate preference for 
them. The moral sinew of the English must have been strong indeed 
when it admitted of such stringentf bracing ; but, on the whole, they 
were ruled as they preferred to be ruled ; and if wisdom can be tested 
by success, the manner in which they passed the great crisis of the 
Reformation is the best justification of their princes. The era was 
great throughout Europe. The Italians of the age of Michael Angelo ; 
the Spaniards who were the contemporaries of Cortez ; the Germans 
who shook off the Pope at the call of Luther ; and the splendid chiv- 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 455 

airy of Francis I. of France, were no common men. But they were 
all brought face to face with the same trials, and none met them as 
the English met them. The English alone never lost their self-pos- 
session, and if they owed something to fortune in their escape from 
anarchy, they owed more to the strong hand and steady purpose of 
their rulers. 

" To conclude this chapter, then. 

" In the brief review of the system under which England was gov- 
erned, we have seen a state of things in which the principles of poli- 
tical economy were, consciously or unconsciously, contradicted ; where 
an attempt, more or less successful, was made to bring the production 
and distribution of wealth under the moral rule of right or wrong ; 
and where those laws of supply and demand, which we are now taught 
to regard as immutable ordinances of nature, were absorbed or super- 
seded by a higher code. It is necessary for me to repeat that I am 
not holding up the sixteenth century as a model which the nineteenth 
might safely follow. The population has become too large, and em- 
ployment too complicated and fluctuating, to admit of such control ; 
while, in default of control, the relapse upon self-interest as the one 
motive principle is certain to ensue, and, when it ensues, is absolute in 
its operations. But as, even with us, these so-called ordinances of 
nature in time of war consent to be suspended, and duty to his country 
becomes with every good citizen a higher motive of action than the 
advantages which he may gain in an enemy's market ; so it is not un- 
cheering to look back upon a time when the nation was in a normal 
condition of militancy against social injustice, — when the Government 
was enabled by happy circumstances to pursue into detail a single 
and serious aim at the well-being — well-being in its widest sense — of all 
members of the commonwealth. There were difficulties and draw- 
backs at that time as well as this. Of Liberty in the modern sense 
of the word, — of the supposed right of every man 4 to do what he will 
with his own,' or with himself, there was no idea. To the question, 
if ever it was aked, ' May I not do what I will with my own ? ' there 
was the brief answer, ' No man may do what is wrong, either with 
what is his own, or with what is another's.' Producers, too, who were 
not permitted to drive down their workmen's wages by competition, 
could not sell their goods as cheaply as they might have done, and 
the consumer paid for the law in an advance of price ; but the burden, 
though it fell heavily on the rich, lightly touched the poor ; and the 
rich consented cheerfully to a tax which insured the loyalty of the 
people. The working-man of modern times has bought the extension 
of his liberty at the price of his material comfort. The higher classes 
have gained in wealth what they have lost in power. It is not for the 
historian to balance advantages. His duty is with the facts." 

Our forefathers, then, were not free, if we attach to that word 
the meaning which our Transatlantic brothers seem inclined to 
give to it. They had not learnt to deify self-will, and to claim 
for each member of the human race a right to the indulgence of 
every eccentricity. They called themselves free, and boasted of 



456 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

their freedom : but their conception of liberty was that of all old 
nations, a freedom which not only allowed of discipline, but 
which grew out of it. No people had less wish to exalt the 
kingly power into that specious tyranny, a paternal government ; 
the king was with them, and always had been, both formally and 
really, subject to their choice ; bound by many oaths to many 
duties ; the minister, not the master of the people. But their 
whole conception of political life was, nevertheless, shaped by 
their conception of family life. Strict obedience, stern disci- 
pline, compulsory education in practical duties, was the law of 
the latter ; wdthout such training they thought their sons could 
never become in any true sense men. And when they grew up, 
their civic life was to be conducted on the same principles, for 
the very purpose of enabling them to live as members of a free 
nation. If the self-will of the individual was curbed, now and 
then, needlessly, (as it is the nature of all human methods to 
caricature themselves at times,) the purpose was, not to weaken 
the man, but to strengthen him, by strengthening the body to 
which he belonged. The nation was to be free, self-helping, 
self-containing, unconquerable ; to that great purpose the will, 
the fancy, even, if need be, the mortal life, of the individual must 
give way. Men must be trained at all costs in self-restraint, 
because only so could they become heroes in the day of danger ; 
in self-sacrifice for the common good, because .only so would 
they remain united, while foreign nations and evil home influ- 
ences were trying to tear them asunder. In a word, their con- 
ception of life was as a w T arfare ; their organization, that of a 
regiment. It is a question whether the conception of corporate 
life embodied in a regiment or army, be not, after all, the best 
working one for this world. At least the problem of a perfect 
society, howsoever beautiful on paper, will always issue in a 
compromise, more or less perfect, (let us hope more and more 
perfect as the centuries roll on,) between the strictness of mili- 
tary discipline, and the Irishman's laissez-faire ideal, wherein 
" every man should do that which was right in the sight of his 
own eyes, and ivrong too, if he liked" At least, such had Eng- 
land been for centuries ; under such a system had she thriven ; 
a fact which, duly considered, should silence somewhat those 
gentlemen who (not being of a military turn themselves) inform 
Europe so patriotically and so prudently, that " England is not a 
military nation." 

From this dogma we beg leave to differ utterly. Britain is 
at this moment, in our eyes, the only military nation in Europe. 
All other nations seem to us to have military governments, but 
not to be military themselves. As proof of the assertion, we 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 457 

appeal merely to the existence of our militia. While other na- 
tions are employing conscription, we have raised, in twelve 
months, a noble army, every soul of which has volunteered as a 
free man ; and yet, forsooth, we are not a military nation ! YYe 
are not ashamed to tell how, but the other .day, standing in the 
rear of those militia regiments, no matter where, a flush of pride 
came over us at the sight of those lads, but a few months since 
helpless and awkward country boors, now full of sturdy intelli- 
gence, cheerful obedience, and the manhood which can afford to 
be respectful to others, because it respects itself, and knows that 
it is respected in turn. True, they had not the lightness, the 
order, the practical ease, the cunning self-helpfulness of the 
splendid German legionaries who stood beside them, the breast 
of every other private decorated with clasps and medals for ser- 
vice in the wars of seven years since. As an invading body, 
perhaps, one would have preferred the Germans ; but only be- 
cause experience had taught them already, what it would teach 
in twelve months to the Berkshire or Cambridge " clod." There, 
to us, was the true test of England's military qualities ; her 
young men had come by tens of thousands, of their own free- 
will, to be made soldiers of by her country gentlemen, and 
treated by them the while as men to be educated, not as things 
to be compelled ; not driven like sheep to the slaughter, to be 
disciplined by men with whom they had no bond but the mere 
official one of military obedience ; and " what," we asked our- 
selves, " does England lack to make her a second Rome ? Her 
people have physical strength, animal courage, that self-depend- 
ence of freemen which enabled at Inkermann the privates to fight 
on literally without officers, every man for his own hand. She 
has inventive genius, enormous wealth : and if, as is said, her 
soldiers lack at present the self-helpfulness of the Zouave, it is 
ridiculous to suppose that that quality could long be wanting in 
the men of a nation which is at this moment the foremost in the 
work of emigration and colonization. If organizing power and 
military system be, as is said, lacking in high quarters, surely 
there must be organizing power enough somewhere, in the great- 
est industrial nation upon earth, ready to come forward, when 
there is a real demand for it ; and, whatever be the defects of 
our system, we are surely not as far behind Prussia or France, 
as Rome was behind the Carthaginians and the Greeks whom 
they crushed. A few years sufficed for them to learn all they 
needed from their enemies ; fewer still would suffice us to learn 
from our friends. Our working-classes are not, like those of 
America, in a state of physical comfort too great to make it 
worth while for them to leave their home occupations ; and 
20 



458 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

whether that be a good or an evil, it at least insures us, as our 
militia proves, an almost inexhaustible supply of volunteers. 
What a new and awful scene for the world's drama, did such a 
nation as this once set before itself, steadily and ruthlessly, as 
Rome did of old, the idea of conquest. Even now, waging war 
as she has done, as it were & napepyu, thinking war too unim- 
portant a part of her work to employ on it her highest intellects, 
her flag has advanced, in the last fifty years, over more vast and 
richer tracts than that of any European nation upon earth. What 
keeps her from the dream which lured to their destruction Baby- 
lon, Macedonia, Rome ? " 

This : that, thank God, she has a conscience still ; that feeling 
intensely the sacredness of her own national life, she has learnt 
to look on that of other people's as sacred also ; and since, in the 
fifteenth century, she finally repented of that wild and unright- 
eous dream of conquering France, she has discovered more and 
more that true military greatness lies in the power of defence, 
and not of attack ; in not waging war, but being able to wage it ; 
and has gone on her true mission of replenishing the earth more 
peacefully, on the whole, and more humanely, than did ever 
nation before her, conquering only when it was necessary to put 
down the lawlessness of the savage few, for the well-being of the 
civilized many. This has been her idea ; she may have confused 
it and herself, in Caffre or in Chinese wars ; for who can always 
be true to the light within him ? But this has been her idea ; 
and therefore she stands and grows and thrives, a virgin land for 
now eight hundred years. 

But a fancy has come over us, during the last blessed forty 
years of unexampled peace, from which our ancestors of the six- 
teenth century were kept, by stern and yet most wholesome les- 
sons ; the fancy that peace, and not war, is the normal condition 
of the world. The fancy is so fair, that we blame none who 
cherish it ; after all, they do good by cherishing it ; they point us 
to an ideal which we should otherwise forget, as Babylon, Rome, 
France in the seventeenth century, forgot utterly. Only they are 
in haste (and pardonable haste too) to realize that ideal, forgetting 
that to do so would be really to stop short of it, and to rest con- 
tented in some form of human society, far lower than that which 
God has actually prepared for those who love him. Better to 
believe that all our conceptions of the height to which the human 
race might attain, are poor and paltry compared with that toward 
which God is guiding it, and for which he is disciplining it by 
awful lessons ; and to fight on, if need be, ruthless and yet full 
of pity, (and many a noble soul has learnt within the last two 
years how easy it is to reconcile in practice that seeming paradox 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 459 

of words,) smiting down stoutly evil, wheresoever we shall find 
it, and saying, " What ought to be, we know not ; God alone can 
know : but that this ought not to be, we do know, and here, in 
God's name, it shall not stay." 

We repeat it : war, in some shape or other, is the normal con- 
dition of the world. It is a fearful fact: but we shall not abolish 
it by ignoring it, and ignoring by the same method the teaching 
of our Bibles. Not in mere metaphor does the gospel of Love 
describe the life of the individual good man as a perpetual war- 
fare. Not in mere metaphor does the apostle of love see in his 
visions of the world's future no Arcadian shepherd paradises, not 
even a perfect civilization, but an eternal war in heaven, wrath 
and woe, plague and earthquake ; and amid the everlasting 
storm, the voices of the saints beneath the alter, crying, Lord, how 
long ? Shall we pretend to have more tender hearts than the old 
man of Ephesus, whose dying sermon, so old legends say, was 
nought but — " Little children, love one another ; " and yet could 
denounce the liar and the hater and the covetous man, and pro- 
claim the vengeance of God against all evil-doers, with all the 
fierceness of an Isaiah ? It was enough for him — let it be enough 
for us — that he could see, above the thunder-cloud, and the rain 
of blood, and the scorpion swarm, and the great angel calling all 
the fowl of heaven to the supper of the great God, that they 
might eat the flesh of kings and valiant men, a city of God eter- 
nal in the heavens, and yet eternally descending among men ; a 
perfect order, justice, love, and peace, becoming actual more and 
more in every age, through all the fearful training needful for a 
fallen race. 

Let that be enough for us : but do not let us fancy that what 
is true of the two extremes, must not needs be true of the mean 
also ; that while the life of the individual and of the universe is 
one of perpetual self-defence, the life of the nation can be aught 
else : or that any appliances of scientific comforts, any intellec- 
tual cultivation, even any the most direct and common-sense argu- 
ments of self-interest, can avail to quiet in man those outbursts 
of wrath, ambition, cupidity, wounded pride, which have periodi- 
cally convulsed, and will convulse to the end, the human race. 
The philosopher in his study may prove their absurdity, their 
suicidal folly, till, deluded by the strange lull of a forty years' 
peace, he may look on wars as in the same category with flagel- 
lantisms, witch-manias, and other " popular delusions," as insani- 
ties of the past, impossible henceforth, and may prophesy, as 
really wise political economists were doing in 1847, that man- 
kind had grown too sensible to go to war any more. And 
behold, the peace proves only to be the lull before the thunder- 



460 KINGSLEY'S MISCELLANIES. 

storm ; and one electric shock sets free forces unsuspected, 
transcendental, supernatural in the deepest sense, which we can 
no more stop, by shrieks at their absurdity, from incarnating 
themselves in actual blood, and misery, and horror, than we 
can control the madman in his paroxysm, by telling him that 
he is a madman. And so the fair vision of the student is buried 
once more in rack and hail, and driving storm ; and, like 
Daniel of old, when rejoicing over the coming restoration of 
his people, he sees beyond the victory some darker struggle 
still, and lets his notes of triumph die away into a wail, — 
"And the end thereof shall be with a flood; and to the end 
of the war desolations are determined." 

It is as impossible as it would be unwise, to conceal from our- 
selves the fact, that all the Continental nations look upon our 
present peace as but transitory, momentary ; and on the Crimean 
war as but the prologue to a fearful drama — all the more fearful 
because none knows its purpose, its plot, which character will be 
assumed by any given actor, and least of all, the denouement of 
the whole. All that they feel and know is, that every thing 
which has happened since 1848 has exasperated, not calmed, the 
electric tension of the European atmosphere ; that a rottenness, 
rapidly growing intolerable alike " to God and to the enemies of 
God," has eaten into the vitals of Continental life ; that their 
rulers know neither where they are, nor whither they are going, 
and only pray that things may last out their time: all notes 
which one would interpret as proving the Continent to be 
already ripe for subjection to some one devouring race of con- 
querors, were there not a ray of hope in an expectation, even 
more painful to our human pity, which is held by some of the 
wisest among the Germans; namely, that the coming war 
will fast resolve into no struggle between bankrupt monarchs 
and their respective armies, but a war between nations them- 
selves, an internecine war of opinions and of creeds. There are 
wise Germans now who prophesy with sacred tears, a second 
" thirty years' war " with all its frantic horrors for their hapless 
country, which has found two centuries too short a time wherein 
to recover from the exhaustion of that first fearful scourge. Let 
us trust that if that war shall beget its new Tillys and Wallen- 
steins, it shall also beget its new Gustavus Adolphus, and many 
another child of Light : but let us not hope that we can stand 
by, in idle comfort, and that when the overflowing scourge passes 
by, it shall not reach to us. Shame to us, were that our destiny. 
Shame to us, were we to refuse our share in the struggles of the 
human race, and to stand by in idle comfort, while the Lord's 
battles are being fought. Honour to us, if in that day, we have 



ENGLAND FROM WOLSEY TO ELIZABETH. 461 

chosen for our leaders, as our forefathers of the sixteenth century 
did, men who see the work which God would have them do, and 
have hearts and heads to do it. Honour to us, if we spend this 
transient lull, as our forefathers of the sixteenth century did, in 
setting our house in order, in redressing every grievance, reform- 
ing every abuse, knitting the hearts of the British nation together 
by practical care and help between class and class, man and man, 
governor and governed, that we may bequeath to our children, as 
Hei ry the Eighth's men did to theirs, a British national life, so 
united and whole-hearted, so clear in purpose, and sturdy in exe- 
cution, so trained to know the right side at the first glance, and 
take it, that they shall look back with love and honour upon us, 
their fathers, determined to carry out, even to the death, the 
method which we have bequeathed to them. Then, if God will 
that the powers of evil, physical and spiritual, should combine 
against this land, as they did in the days of good Queen Bess, 
we shall not have lived in vain ; for those who, as in Queen 
Bess's days, thought to yoke for their own use a labouring ox, 
will find, as then, that they have roused a lion from his den. 



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